“Michael Haneke is back to many of his old tricks in Happy End, which enfolds the child psychopathy of Benny’s Video, the bourgeois nightmare of Hidden, the euthanasia theme of Amour, and the racial discomfort of Code Unknown into a curious, disconcerting and sometimes insidiously effective greatest hits tableau,” announces the Telegraph’s Tim Robey.
“Happy End is a satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “as stark, brilliant and unforgiving as a halogen light. It is not a new direction for this filmmaker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.”
“Michael Haneke is modern cinema’s tomb raider of abject gloom,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies, where he introduces us to the cast, “an affluent family of costal French industrialists, the Laurents. Ice cold Anne (Isabelle Huppert) is head puppet master, pacifying members of the clan and keeping business dealings bubbling over. Brother Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz) is bunking over with his depressed daughter Eve (Fantine Harduin), whose mother (his ex-wife) is critically ill in hospital. Family black sheep Pierre (Franz Rogowski) vents his frustrations through gymnastic karaoke, while Anne’s cantankerous father George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is in constant search of the title’s illusive happy end.”
“Haneke reminds us, too, that just down the road from the Laurents is the Calais migrant camp,” notes Time Out’s Dave Calhoun. “[I]f we’re to read anything into the Laurents’s diseased privilege, we should assume Haneke is talking about much more than just one family. This is a state-of-modern-Europe morality play.”
Variety’s Peter Debruge finds that “there’s almost no trace of the humane, empathetic sensibility that somehow snuck its way into Amour to be found here—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering the director spent most of his career spelunking the ice caves of his own cynicism, successfully unsettling us with what he found there.”
At Ioncinema, Nicholas Bell notes that “Happy End marks Haneke’s fourth union with Isabelle Huppert, which famously began with 2001’s The Piano Teacher, one of the indomitable performer’s signature roles. He allows Huppert to be unleashed once again as an icy matriarch whose main concerns are some underhanded maneuverings with the family business she now runs singlehandedly. An unfortunate workplace accident, shown by the company’s security footage, seems to be the turning point for Anne to make a decision on firing her troublesome son as a manager, which leads to a spiraling meltdown of alcohol, violence, and an incredibly animated karaoke performance of Sia.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Deborah Young finds it “hard to pin down the theme of the piece. Is it the poison of power and money that is passed down from generation to generation? The lack of love or any other type of emotional connection among family members? The virtual enslavement of the servants and the hypocrisy of pretending to care about their welfare, but then not sending their little girl to get rabies shots when she’s bitten by the watchdog? The problem is that it’s all of the above, a general social malaise involving the upper class, the lower class and the new outcasts—the African migrants stuck in Europe dreaming of a better life.”
“Working with trusted collaborators in DP Christian Berger, editor Monika Willi, the always reliable Huppert (who has at least one clear-cut insta-classic scene to add to her career highlight reel) and the brilliant Trintignant, Haneke moves the Laurents like pieces on an aesthetically-pristine chess board,” writes Nikola Grozdanovic at the Playlist. “The camera is either gliding along with them or stuck frozen in place to reveal (in many cases, purposefully avoid revealing) the tragedy unfolding on screen. All throughout, Haneke’s awareness of our spectating gaze is as surgically precise as ever; conversations are drowned out by traffic, key moments are kept in the far foreground, and faces are kept off screen. Happy End pulsates with purpose in every frame.”
IndieWire’s Eric Kohn finds it “fascinating to watch the 75-year-old Haneke explore how modern-day technology has only further exacerbated the tendency for people to retreat into their lonely worlds, with the use of the camera-phone videos and social media planting the director’s voyeuristic fixations into the 21st century.”
“The lukewarm reaction to [Sunday night’s] press screening of Happy End, signaled by a smattering of polite applause and a mild chorus of boos, likely dashed a great many hopes that it will at least be considered the festival’s popular favorite,” notes Barbara Scharres at RogerEbert.com. “Happy End is a thinner and more scattered piece of work than might be expected of Haneke at this stage in his career. None of these characters are clearly defined, and each serves an ambiguous purpose in a larger story that feels incomplete rather than open-ended.”
“Ultimately, this will count as an interlocutory title in the director’s impressive filmography,” predicts Screen’s Lee Marshall.
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