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If you didn’t already know this was a Michael Haneke film, you might suspect it was the art-house equivalent of a genre parody of Michael Haneke films—and that’s not a compliment. The director fixes his chilly gaze on the upper-class Laurent family: Anne (Isabelle Huppert), who’s running the family construction business; Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who’s experiencing symptoms of dementia; Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), Anne’s brother, who has to take in Eve (Fantine Harduin), his 12-year-old daughter from his first marriage, after her mother overdoses; and Pierre (Franz Rogowski), Anne’s black-sheep son. They’re all unhappy to varying degrees and for various reasons, and Haneke rarely makes an attempt to pull those stories together to make any larger point more profound than “these people are terrible.” Worse still, while he can make individual moments unsettling, here they feel like familiar spins on unsettling bits he’s used to better effect in earlier movies: sociopathic behavior by young people; observing violence from a distance; exploring the dehumanizing nature of technology. Those who dismissed most of his other movies as virtuosity mired in misanthropy don’t exactly need to rewrite their theses for this one.
Official Site: sonyclassics.com/happyend
Director: Michael Haneke
Producer: Margaret Ménégoz, Stefan Arndt and Michael Katz
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Fantine Harduin, Franz Rogowski, Laura Verlinden, Aurélia Petit, Toby Jones, Hille Perl, Hassam Ghancy, Nabiha Akkari and Joud Geistlich
Director: Michael Haneke
Producer: Margaret Ménégoz, Stefan Arndt and Michael Katz
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Fantine Harduin, Franz Rogowski, Laura Verlinden, Aurélia Petit, Toby Jones, Hille Perl, Hassam Ghancy, Nabiha Akkari and Joud Geistlich
