Capsule reviews.

“IF YOUR GIRLFRIEND ASKS IF YOU WOULD STILL LOVE HER IF SHE WAS A WORM, JUST SAY YES.”

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

There’s this meme that went around last year that is about your girlfriend asking “would you still love me if I was a worm”…obviously, to the extent this is a serious joke, it’s about asking if your partner will still love you through life’s changes. But it’s a worm specifically, I assume, because a worm is 1) disgusting and 2) helpless. Would you still love me if you could crush me in your hands, and if you had every reason to want to, just based on instinctual repulsion? Or because it would be fun?

I always avoided The Piano Teacher because it seemed pretty gross, and, well. It is. I can’t really think of a movie that made me full body cringe this hard recently.¹ The dramatic excellence of the movie, I think, derives from this: we worry about poor healthy young piano student Walter, getting drawn into an affair with h…