Every Unhappy Family . . . a Review of Michael Haneke’s “Happy End”

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At seventy-five, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke is a world treasure, a director you can trust to save any given year’s worth of films from banality, sloppiness and forgetability. He’s our patron saint of existential chill, and his run since the turn of the century has few rivals. With luck he’ll be blessed with a Ridley Scott-like septuagenarian workaholism and keep one-upping himself for years to come.

Each Haneke film is a shock to the system—anyone who’s seen The Piano Teacher (2001) knows the filmmaker is not playing, while the incomparable Cache (2005) remains an insidious portrait of surveilled modern life (and postcolonial guilt). If too few viewers have come to terms with post-apocalyptic ellipses of Time of the Wolf (2003), then plenty have locked gears with the Nazi premonition The White Ribbon (2009) and the grey-panther ground zero of Amour (2012).

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke is a world treasure, our patron saint of existential chill.

His new film, Happy End, is Haneke reworking territory familiar to him—family, bourgeoisie narcissism, class conflict, latent psychopathy, the viewing of life through screens, and so, is one of 2017’s best films. We start off in a distinctly Hanekian mode, on the smart phone of an unseen and unheard kid, recording her mother covertly at home and dropping Instagram Live-style texts into it about what a selfish bitch she is. Cut to a hamster in a cage, which we are similarly informed has been fed some crushed pills; in seconds, the hamster drops dead. “Voila,” she types. Next, we see mom, prone in the next room, and we fear the worst.

Which is where Haneke goes, in this novelistic exploration of a self-poisoning family of wealth and industry, but not before the very next sequence: a minute-and-a-half anamorphic shot of a massive construction site. We don’t know why we’re watching, and then we do, as a cement wall spontaneously collapses, taking a porta-potty with it, and the hapless immigrant worker apparently inside.

It won’t be the last immigrant to suffer at the film’s perimeters. The rather Trumpian family in question hovers around the elderly patriarch (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is on the edge of dementia and knows it, and is looking for a way to finally die. His daughter (Isabelle Huppert) runs the family construction business, while trying to manage her hot-headed addict son (Franz Rogowski). Her brother, a doctor (Mathieu Kassovitz), is an inept solipsist at the heart of the film’s rot: It’s his twelve-year-old daughter with the iPhone (Fantine Harduin), and his ex-wife that has mysteriously OD’ed, leaving the very wary young girl to move in with the rest of the clan in their manor house in Calais. He also has a new wife (Laura Verlinden) and baby, and a crazy mistress fond of sending him obsessive sexts. Because they’re all oblivious and self-obsessed, no one else knows what we know: that Harduin’s timid little sylph is a sociopath, a homicidal manifestation of their callousness.

You have to assemble this portrait on your own; Haneke’s style is cool and elliptical, and he conscientiously leaves out a lot of connective narrative tissue and exposition, making you lean in, searching for secrets. (The process of watching a Haneke is often like trying to glean toxic secrets from real people you know.) The subtext accumulates, too, as the white family collides with servants, migrants, and bystanders from other countries in ways that seem merely irritating and peripheral to them, but which form a telling baseline for a world in which this fractured family could hold onto to such power and wealth.

In fact, that the workers and servants are so marginal in the film makes its own form-meet-content statement—just as the puzzle-piece structure says scads about the characters’ narrow visions and piecemeal knowledge of the world. Haneke’s primary fascination is with the cultural decay wrought by secrets and guilt, and every now and then, as with Cache and 2000's Code Unknown, his canvas goes wide, and the open secrets of France itself are on the block.

All the same, Happy End is a movie of boundless subtleties—the dangerous twelve-year-old is, in fact, a scared and wounded kid, who eventually takes pills herself, as Huppert’s uber-mom doggedly only tries to do what’s right. Kassovitz’s philanderer is genuinely fraught with concern for his daughter, even after he realizes she poisoned her mother and after she’s read his archive of sexts. As for Trintignant’s suicidal codger, he turns out to be perhaps the most cold-blooded member of the family—or the most realistic? Haneke’s not the first to target the haute bourgeoisie’s hollowness and cruel culpability, God knows, but in this season of squalid power, he may be the best.

Michael Atkinson is a writer, poet and film critic. His latest book is the novel Hemingway Cutthroat.