Michael Haneke’s new film gleams with cold gallows humour. There’s blunt, rasping comedy to be found in its thematic grimness (Happy End might also be titled Death Wish), though the Austrian director’s bleak worldview won’t be to everyone’s taste. The plot begins with 13 year-old Eve (Fantine Harduin), who is forced to stay with her father Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), in Calais, with his new wife and their young child after her mother overdoses. Also living in the Laurent family home is Thomas’s sister, severe real estate developer Anne (Isabelle Huppert), and their depressed father Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant of Haneke’s Amour), who at a robust 84 is “too healthy” to qualify for the assisted suicide he seeks, and so must make alternative arrangements. Eve moves quietly, watching the adults around her.
One of the most interesting things about Happy End is the way Haneke’s camera captures the act of watching; always interested in technology and surveillance, here he often favours fixed perspectives, trailing his characters over the shoulder or looking with detachment from an unmoving vantage point. A fist-fight plays out from a voyeuristic, clinical remove, while the film’s opening takes place via a series of darkly funny Snapchat-style videos. Eve discovers her father’s laptop and a series of sexually explicit messages on a Facebook-style website.
It’s pretty upsetting stuff, but we’re encouraged to laugh, and to see the Laurents as a parody of bourgeois selfishness (Haneke inserts BBC News footage to highlight how glaringly unaware the family are of the refugee crisis taking place on their doorstep). There are some brilliantly zany comic moments too; an interpretive dance sequence set to Sia’s Chandelier, Huppert’s Anne dislocating somebody’s finger, and a magnificent final set piece filmed on an iPhone.
