We first meet mother-of-two Anne (Huppert) dragging her kids past blazing pyres of farm animals after her husband has been shot dead at their country cabin.

It could be Cumbria at the height of the foot and mouth outbreak (well, apart from the fatal shooting)...but it's a lot, lot worse.

For a start it's France and after some unnamed catastrophe the country folk - like, it would appear country folk everywhere, are not too receptive to strangers calling.

Eventually, Anne and her children Ben (Lucas Biscombe) and Eva (Anais Demoustier) find some sort of refuge at an old railway station.

There they find a sullen group of survivors apparently waiting for a train in the same way Estragon annd Vladamir hang about for Godot.

We know the engine exists because we saw it chugging happily - albeit with guards riding shotgun - through a countryside littered with animal carcasses and the odd human corpse.

Quite why it was adhering to the existing timetable with armageddon looming or would even want to stop for a crowd of squabbling crusties is never really explained.

Anyway, the waiting room becomes the focus of a lot of the Lord of Flies-style political infighting while Beatrice Dalle chimes in with some religious claptrap about The Just.

Just what she's on about is never deemed worthy of explanation but it's all part and parcel of the sort of cod philosophy French cinema has made its own.

What the film is strong on is the disintegration of the family unit as they are pitched into a medieval world where bartering and even prostitution are now the common currency.

It's been suggested this is a comment on a world turned upside down by the end of the Cold War but the attack by rural thugs on a group of illegal immigrants appears risibly politically correct.

Haneke is at his surest when relating a tale of survival without recourse to the values and dictates of Hollywood's disaster movie genre.

Kept pure and simple this would have been a powerful piece of film-making...but it thinks it's a lot cleverer than it actually is.

Tim Evans