The first images of Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” a film shot in a delicately lambent palette suggestive of old gelatin silver prints, is of a shrub-ringed meadow, a horse and rider approaching steadily from the horizon. Set in the peaceful period just before Germany’s entry into World War I, it seems poised to offer up a storybook location: all mewling animals, rustling leaves and pies cooling on windowsills. Then the horse goes flying through the air, tripped by a length of wire strung across its path.

For those familiar with Haneke, who’s made a career of sinisterly tweaking idyllic settings, this is a mostly hollow surprise. More accurately, it functions as the mean punch line to a quick visual joke. For in his oeuvre these storybook locations, in this case the bucolic old Germany of quaint villages and little farms, exist not only as legends to be refuted but a fittingly black-and-white canvas for snarled morality plays, offering generally unsophisticated lessons whose complexity can be gauged by how much slack one is willing to give him. Like the other tranquil institutions he has somewhat jaggedly debunked in the past (bourgeois Western Europe, the purity of childhood) violence dominates the society of “The White Ribbon” because of its ingrained use as a foundational tool, a hidden embrace of cruelty that belies the surface sense of calm.

In this case, the tripped horseman is the first in a series of violent deeds — seeping manifestations of this buried violence — which are apparently acted out by the town’s children. Schooled in a draconian system of harsh discipline and abuse, they reflect this treatment crudely, venting, like their parents, upon the weak and defenseless. In the style of most of Haneke’s films, the story provides a moral lesson through the employment of decidedly low-culture tactics. It deflates the myth of an idyllic, pre-lapsarian Europe while providing a snappy ancestral link to the wide-scale horror in which this generation will soon be implicated.

There’s nothing unique about this sort of prickly nihilism. The culture of the film, where children assert themselves through a warped form of role model emulation, has a logical ancestor in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Chinese Roulette,” where a deficiently raised child regurgitates the bad example of her parents into a series of punishing parlor games. Yet “The White Ribbon,” like so many of Haneke’s films, remains borderline objectionable not because of its dark outlook but because it feels ethically rotten, despite the highly moral lessons it seems eager to teach. Like the children of the film, Haneke gets our attention by picking on the weak and the innocent, exploiting their near-sacred status to heighten feelings of danger and anxiety.

Although cheap, this has proven to be a common tactic for the director. Much has been made of his schoolmaster presentation, the way he chastises his audience for perceived wrongs. Yet, whatever the intent, his movies could not exist without violence; they employ it freely while damning its use, creating a kind of double standard where bearing witness is deemed unacceptable for some purposes (crystallized by the rewind scene in 1997’s “Funny Games,” where the audience is reprimanded for cheering the murder of an antagonist) but acceptable as a finger-wagging, attention-grabbing device.

It may seem unnecessary to pursue this issue in the wake of “The White Ribbon,” which truly seems like Haneke’s warmest and most sympathetic film in years, if not ever. Yet for all the light pockets of humanism that populate this story, its willingness to approach characters as human beings rather than movable rhetoric objects, it still continues the troubling tendencies that have made his films generally queasy exercises, a reliance on shock tactics that damages the ability to view them as truly serious statements.

This argument against Haneke can be organized around his use of children, whose relationship with violence in these films is nearly omnipresent. In his work, children are both agents and recipients of violence – it passes through them the same way it does his other characters — but they or stories relating to them are at the forefront more often than not: the euthanized Eva of “The Seventh Continent,” the unhinged Benny of “Benny’s Video,” the homeless Romanian boy of “71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance,” up through the forgotten boyhood malice of 2005’s “Caché.” But does this use of characters, who in a more forgiving narrative might function as innocents, suggest a cohesive theme? Or is it simply an easy method of exploitation, pushing the right buttons for maximum shock value?

The variable would seem to be those films which do not involve the central use of young actors — 2000’s “Code Unknown” and 2002’s “The Piano Teacher.” The end products here are not vastly different from his other projects: coldly beautiful, with tensely drawn shots, measured pacing, an infected sense of discomfort and dread. Both films still trade heavily in violence. Both employ distancing measures to keep the audience off balance: inter-generational romance, rough sex, self-mutilation, uncomfortable confrontations in enclosed spaces. Most damningly, both find occasion for a little child abuse, whether it’s a baby dangling off the edge of a roof (“Code Unknown”), or a bloodied young pianist, her fingers sliced by shards of glass.

It’s hard to imagine a Haneke film not predicated on these characteristics. It’s equally hard to imagine one that does not end with a thudding moral lesson. Films like the two above, which weave complicated stories and contain complicated emotions, are certainly reduced to by their conclusions, which feel incongruously simple, shaped more in the interest of a blunt statement than a logical resolution. This occurs most plainly in “71 Fragments,” which positions a bank massacre by a quiet student as the endpoint of a constant exposure to violence mixed with some momentary frustration.

This reliance, both on shock tactics and unearned conclusions, leaves his films impaired and easily prone to criticism. Despite his supposed intentions, Haneke expresses none of the real morality of a director like Rohmer or Bresson, although his presentation feels equally stolid and pedantic.

The question of this reliance is deepened by Haneke’s attitudes toward violence performed upon animals, which if not casual is at least familiar. The killing of real animals on film is always a queasy proposition, especially one as majestic as a horse, which gets its throat unceremoniously slit in 2003’s “Time of the Wolf.” Whether this kind of things is ever justified is it’s own question, but the number of times it occurs in his films acts as another piece of negative evidence. Even more than children, animals are innocents, and their continued on-screen persecution signifies a definite eye toward provocation.

This is not to say there isn’t a logical reasoning behind these choices. “Benny’s Video,” a work which mainly concerns the slaughter of a pig and the murder of a child, draws a definite parallel between these two deaths, suggesting a world where violence’s omnipresence negates its impact. But these small points are lost in the thumping procession of cruelty that populates his movies. By consistently setting the pitch at such an exaggerated level, placing shock front and center, he assures that these small points are buried far beneath the controversy, leaving films whose basically decent messages are irreparably damaged.