Stitching together actual media clips and celebrity news items, this film tracks various alienated urbanites, —including a runaway Romanian boy (Urdes) living in Vienna's squalid subway tunnels and a couple struggling with their newly adopted daughter—, whose fates all intersect through one inexplicable act of mass violence.

Not for all tastes, Haneke's provocative take on emotional stagnation in the modern world was one of the Austrian director's first attempts to come to terms with society's hidden violence and the deafening, meaningless roar of today's mediascape, where grim scenes from Bosnia and Somalia play alongside Michael Jackson's lurid molestation trial. The framing device for his jet-black meditation is the deadly rampage committed by a seemingly normal 19-year-old jock (Lukas Miko), but as with "The Piano Teacher" or "Caché," Haneke's true interest is to upset bourgeois complacency.