Hap­py End

That title, if it real­ly needs to be con­firmed, is iron­ic. Michael Haneke is mod­ern cinema’s tomb raider of abject gloom. His cam­era is minute­ly cal­i­brat­ed to cap­ture (and ampli­fy) human suf­fer­ing, and also the humans who pre­cip­i­tate said suf­fer­ing. And then, on top of that, you have what we might term ​“ambi­ent suf­fer­ing”, which is an entire­ly nat­ur­al, non-man made form of suf­fer­ing that comes part and par­cel with the bur­den of human sentience.

His intrigu­ing and oblique new puz­zle film presents this suf­fer­ing in all its dis­parate forms, and focus­es par­tic­u­lar­ly on how it has man­i­fest with­in the ranks of an afflu­ent fam­i­ly of coastal 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 karaōke ses­sions, while Anne’s can­tan­ker­ous father George (Jean-Louis Trintig­nant) is in con­stant search of the title’s illu­sive hap­py end.

Haneke’s pre­vi­ous film, Amour, saw an old cou­ple con­demned to deal with the grotesque process of mor­tal­i­ty, but in Hap­py End Haneke sug­gests that the pos­si­bil­i­ty of love is dwin­dling in a world in which dig­i­tal inter­faces serve to thwart phys­i­cal rela­tion­ships. In one sequence, George shows some old pho­tographs of his late wife to Eve, and a sen­ti­men­tal bond is formed. The pri­ma­cy of pho­tog­ra­phy retains its val­ue – it’s when you add cap­tion box­es and a live stream­ing video option that mat­ters become more complex.

As usu­al, Haneke stages mun­dane domes­tic scenes in a way where a sud­den out­burst of extreme vio­lence should nev­er be dis­count­ed. You watch each shot with a sin­gle thought: what could pos­si­bly go wrong here? He uses the frame in intrigu­ing ways, plant­i­ng red her­rings in the back­drop or tuck­ing them away in a cor­ner. Anne and Thomas argue in his apart­ment, and a fraz­zled Thomas drifts ever clos­er towards the bal­cony as it’s look­ing more like­ly that Anne has him ver­bal­ly pinned.

This hair-trig­ger sen­si­bil­i­ty is the remark­able qual­i­ty on which Haneke has built his king­dom, and it makes his films com­pelling even when (like here) there’s no con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive thread. This is a film which will no doubt reward repeat­ed view­ings as a way to catch all of the sub­tle sym­me­tries and to divulge the true mean­ing of each enig­mat­ic scene. There’s one sequence where Eve wan­ders through a gar­den par­ty and over­hears ran­dom snatch­es of dull con­ver­sa­tions – like a walk­ing, talk­ing social media feed.

Hap­py End is a Haneke mega mix, and the haters are very much gonna hate. But there is some­thing irre­sistible about the director’s hos­tile pre­ci­sion and the way in which he offers a sur­prise along with every lac­er­at­ing cut. It’s a film about a world grad­u­al­ly slid­ing into an abyss of moral degra­da­tion, but at the same time, there are traces which make you think that Haneke secret­ly believes it’s a world worth saving.