Adapted from Elfriede Jelinek's novel Die Klavierspielerin, The Piano Teacher is a powerful and controversial work from award-winning filmmaker Michael Haneke. Isabelle Huppert gives a performance of astounding emotional intensity as Erika Kohut, a repressed, middle-aged woman who teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with her tyrannical mother (Annie Girardot), with whom she has a volatile love-hate relationship. But when one of Erika's students, the handsome and assured Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), attempts to seduce her, the barriers that she has carefully erected around her claustrophobic world are shattered, unleashing a previously inhibited extreme and uncontrollable desire.