(Credits: Far Out / Gage Skidmore)
Sun 24 August 2025 16:15, UK
The most disturbing films aren’t the big, shouty thrillers or the blood overdose horrors. Instead, they creep in quieter than that. Slow burners, little peeks at secret urges, throwaway glances, the odd hesitant shuffle closer to the inner minds of whoever’s up there on the screen.
It’s in that space where the real darkness lives – the slow nibble at the edges of what we think is solid, the bit that makes you wonder how far we’d go to grab what we want, or how much pain we’d put ourselves through just to feel something.
When Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher landed in 2001, it sat squarely in that territory, dragging audiences headfirst into the suffocating, repressed life of Erika, an unmarried piano teacher at the Vienna conservatory, played with eerie precision by Isabelle Huppert. It’s a role that more or less nailed her reputation to the mast. Opposite her, Benoît Magimel’s Walter pulls her into a sadomasochistic affair that’s as grim as it is compelling.
For the Doctor Who and Jumanji actor Karen Gillan, The Piano Teacher really stuck with her as a searing and confronting character study. The Scottish actor described Isabelle Huppert’s performance as the best piece of acting she’d ever seen. Gillan is certainly not alone in this opinion, either. Huppert’s incredible performance as a ruthless, sexually frustrated, tightly wound scholar living at home with her overbearing and bullying mother floored audiences at Cannes that year and won her ‘Best Actress’ at the festival.
Gillan pointed to the final scene of the film as the one that really stuck in her mind. (Spoilers incoming.) Earlier, out of sheer jealousy, Erika ruins her student’s chance of performing in the school’s end-of-year concert. Later, she shows up at the conservatory herself, kitchen knife tucked under her arm. Walter turns up all smiles, despite having assaulted her the night before, and for a moment it feels like the whole thing is about to carry on as normal. But just before the concert begins, Erika coolly drives the knife into her own shoulder, walks out into the street, and the screen fades to black.
It’s a strange, unsettling way to close a film that’s already full of them – leaving audiences chewing over Erika’s motives and what might have been swirling round her head. Huppert plays it with this eerie, ghostly calm that makes it all the more haunting. Pulling that off without tipping into melodrama? That’s the sort of acting challenge most performers would probably run a mile from.
“That’s a really interesting character study to me, and that is my other favorite on-screen performance, Isabelle Huppert,” Gillan said of the film. “I just think it’s a really, really interesting character study; again, disturbing. I guess there’s a theme here. [laughs] And her last frame of acting in that movie — not actually the last frame; the last frame is her walking, but the one before that is the best piece of acting I’ve ever seen in my entire life. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you have to go watch it”.
The Piano Teacher is definitely a world away from the films and TV shows of Karen Gillan, who rose to fame as Amy Pond, the companion of the eleventh doctor in Doctor Who, Matt Smith. She’s since starred in the Jumanji and Guardians of the Galaxy franchises, with her films leaning more towards sci-fi and action than psychological, although her love of disturbing films like The Piano Teacher might be the inspiration she needs to enter that genre space. Gillan has mentioned that she’d love to make a horror or a romcom, but her next role, for which she is due to transform into Queen Mary Tudor, helped by her shock of bright red hair, may not tick either of these boxes.
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