After Dark: The Piano Teacher

Step into the shadows and join us After Dark at Everyman Broadgate. This week, we're diving into the dark recesses of desire, obsession, and paraphilia with Michael Haneke's erotic psychological drama, The Piano Teacher.

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, a prestigious music school in Vienna. In her early forties and single, she lives with her overprotective and controlling mother in a hermetically sealed world of love-hate and dependency, where there is no room for men. Her sex life consists of voyeurism and masochistic self-injury.

Lonely and alienated, Erika finds solace by visiting sex shops and experimenting with masochism.

At a recital, she befriends Walter, a handsome young man, whom she seduces and with whom she begins an illicit affair. As Erika slowly drifts closer to the brink of emotional disorder, she uses the love-stricken Walter to explore her darkest sadomasochistic fantasies, which eventually lead to her undoing.