Renowned Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek has been called a lot of things: wunderkind, scandalous author, traitor to the fatherland, feminist, fashion-lover, communist, pessimist, language terrorist, rebel, enfant terrible, brilliant, vulnerable, and rebellious. She is also a Nobel laureate. This is an absorbing, complex, formally freewheeling portrait of Elfriede Jelinek, who in 2004 became the first Austrian author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Concentrating on her artistic, playful, even iconoclastic approach to language, Language Unleashed reveals her extraordinary life story, in her own words, via a montage of archive material with voiceovers and interviews, archival footage, and home movies. Exploring the incendiary collisions between literary aesthetics and politics, the documentary also examines how Jelinek’s work unflinching confronts and uncovers the social, historical, and political contradictions of contemporary Austria. Catherine Müller’s is an intelligent, inventive documentary worthy of its intelligent, inventive subject.