Happy End

Director: Michael Haneke

2017 / 107min / DCP

Isabelle Huppert’s smooth management of the lucrative family construction and shipping business she’s taken over operations of from senile father Jean-Louis Trintignant is threatened by an impending civil suit caused by her no-good son Franz Rogowski’s on-the-job negligence, while 12-year-old niece Ève (Fantine Harduin) casts a baleful eye on goings-on at the mausoleum-like family compound, caught in the grips of torturously mounting anxiety, with her ever-present, unblinking iPhone camera. A comprehensive catalog of classic Haneke motifs (surveillance, barely sublimated racism, inter-generational resentment, guilt as a gnawing cancer), its various moving parts kept whirring by Willi, whose mastery of the ellipsis as a tension-building tool has rarely been shown to better advantage. “As gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera… A black comedy of pure sociopathy.” —The Guardian