Friday, 12 April 2019: Happy End
Friday, 12 April 2019, 20:00
Venue: (see Locations and Tickets for further details)
Programme category: Forest Row Film Society
Director: Michael Haneke, France / Austria / Germany 2017, 107 mins, 15
“Happy End is a satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity: as stark, brilliant and unforgiving as a halogen light. … It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
When her mother goes into a coma caused by a drug overdose, twelve year old Eve moves in with her father, his new wife and baby. They share a palatial bourgeois house with her aunt Anne (Isabelle Huppert) and grandfather George. Through a series of bizarre and sometimes surreal episodes the dysfunctional life of this extended family gradually emerges as the film unfolds.
“As with so many portraits of family dysfunction there is a sense of unease here, one that Haneke amplifies brilliantly. It is a collection of disquieting fragments, discordant snapshots that create a mood of unsettling menace, of impending catastrophe.” The Big Issue
