The key must-see movies of the Austrian auteur’s award-winning career.

In the cinema of Mr Michael Haneke, mordant playfulness dovetails with an icy visual exactitude. Like Mr Ian McEwan, the macabre provocations of the Austrian director’s early work have matured and deepened with each new film. Themes and symbols recur: middle-class complacency, the corruption of children and video recordings, with the real menace kept just outside the frame. Many find him too gratuitously sadistic (Funny Games especially), but his rigour continues to influence some of our boldest filmmakers, from Mr Yorgos Lanthimos to Ms Joanna Hogg. The recent release of his new film Happy End offers the perfect chance to reappraise the director’s canon.

A prophetic multilingual enigma, Code Unknown premiered at Cannes in 2000, a fascinating breakthrough year for visionaries-in-waiting Mr Christopher Nolan (Memento) and Mr Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream), who have both by chance released allegorical films this year that recall their early work. Code Unknown was too strange to be Mr Haneke’s breakthrough, but as a fable for social malaise and communication problems in modern Europe, it feels more relevant than ever, as does its portrayal of racial inequality and exiles in limbo. This is a labyrinthine hall of mirrors to the hypocrisy, dislocation and forgetfulness of Western society, with no clear exit.

In the most complex role of an unparalleled career, Ms Isabelle Huppert (with whom the director has worked four times) bewitches as a formidable music teacher with transgressive sexual tastes. She starts a relationship with a handsome young pupil, to whom she gives instructions to indulge her sadomasochistic fantasies. This is a disquieting sonata to the ravages of art, jealousy and erotic fantasy, but brace yourself. The Slovenian philosopher Mr Slavoj Žižek described one scene as “arguably the most depressive sexual act in the entire history of cinema”. Happy Christmas!

As dark and dense as Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Hidden (otherwise known as Caché) is an extravagantly intelligent thriller about watching and remembering. A Parisian couple are shocked out of their literary upper-middle-class idyll when they receive a series of videotapes. Every creative choice is impeccable, from the pace at which the threats escalate to the casting of national treasures Ms Juliette Binoche and, in particular, Mr Daniel Auteuil. A vain public intellectual who subtly edits himself to look better on TV, he refuses to acknowledge a secret from his family’s past, a metaphor of sorts for the establishment’s cover-up of the 1961 Seine massacre. The film’s final shot, as ambiguous and coyly composed as a painting, preserves the mystery of who sent the tapes, and debate over its true meaning continues to this day.

This Palme d’Or-winning black-and-white fable about the roots of evil embraces every shade of grey. On the cusp of WWI, a spate of violent acts terrorise a German village. Like Mr Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (a favourite of Mr Haneke’s), the symbolic dishonesty of a priest, a doctor and a baron reflects a rotten establishment and infects the generation below. The Guardian’s Mr Peter Bradshaw has suggested the titular white ribbon, a punishment a father uses to shame his children, could be an ancestor of the Jewish star, the Nazi armband, both or neither. Strains of gentleness, like the romance of a schoolteacher or a boy’s protectiveness of an injured bird, punctuate the menace, but don’t survive long. As in Hidden, Mr Haneke refuses to answer who is behind the attacks, and instead focuses on how the community deals with it and the horror it embeds for the future.

Mr Haneke won a second Palme d’Or for this exquisitely sad portrait of love and decline in old age, and it might just be his masterpiece. As ever, the casting is inspired: Ms Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour) and Mr Jean-Louis Trintignant (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) were two icons of 1960s cinema, but both reach career-highs in this devastating chamber piece. Ms Huppert and Mr Trintignant have reprised their father-daughter dynamic for Happy End, a darkly comic sort-of-sequel to Amour. A contender for best film of the century so far.