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

Further reading

1. 1. Time Out
   2. The Guardian
   3. The Telegraph
   4. The Observer
   5. RogerEbert.com
   6. Empire
   7. Interview with Michael Haneke

Trailer