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Happy End

2017

Michael Haneke

Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Fantine Harduin ...

6.1

4,151

Drama A drama about a well-off French family living in a bourgeois bubble in northern France, oblivious to the human misery unfolding in migrant camps around the port town of Calais, a few miles from their home.

Austria’s Foreign Language Submission Academy.

	Author	Review
United States	Peter Debruge Variety	"'Happy End' amounts to a complex, minutely detailed mystery in which every member of the Laurent household contributes to the movie’s almost suffocating sense of malaise."	POS
United States	Deborah Young The Hollywood Reporter	"It’s been done many times before, though Haneke’s masterful Euro-Gothic touch and a riveting cast (...) give it a modernist update and a note of black humor. Still, there seems to be something missing here."	NEU
United States	Eric Kohn IndieWire	"Haneke (...) knows exactly how to mold such nastiness into a maze of tonal possibilities, veering from hypnotic monologues about tragic feelings to twisted developments that venture into the realm of dark comedy."	POS
United States	Nikola Grozdanovic The Playlist	"Austere, darkly comic and stunning cinema (...) Thematic elements, symbols, and situations from every previous Haneke film crash into each other like a glorious symphony"	POS
United States	Ben Croll The Wrap	"The film both demands and rewards our close attention, but Haneke is such a master — his framing so precise, his form so rigorous – that it sucks you in by default."	POS
United States	Barbara Scharres rogerebert.com	"A thinner and more scattered piece of work than might be expected of Haneke (...) None of these characters are clearly defined, and each serves an ambiguous purpose in a larger story that feels incomplete rather than open-ended."	NEG
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"It is not a new direction for this film-maker (...) but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera. (...) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	Lee Marshall Screendaily	"[It] feels like an assemblage of Haneke’s favourite themes (...) Haneke’s famous narrative reticence feels frustrating rather than rewarding"	NEG

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