Jasper Rees

When things fall apart

Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, as ever, perform commandingly

The films of Michael Haneke wear a long face. Psychological terror, domestic horror, sick sex, genital self-harm — these are the joyless tags of his considerable oeuvre. Such an auteur is not the obvious sort for sequels: The Piano Teacher 2 or Hidden — Again! aren’t destined for your nearest multiplex. And yet his new film is an intriguing knight’s move away from his last. Amour (2012) was a hot-button portrait of dementia in which an elderly husband watched his wife’s mind drift away as if on an ice floe. Eventually, he smothered her with a pillow. In Happy End, the widower is back, and this time he’s out to kill himself (although the strapline on the poster is not so jaunty).

Haneke has widened the canvas to include the whole family. Amour was set in a claustrophobic Parisian apartment. Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) has upped sticks for Calais, where he is marooned in the capacious household of his daughter (Isabelle Huppert). The daughter briefly encountered in Amour was known as Eva while her mother was called Anne. Here she becomes Anne, and runs a construction business with her son Pierre (Franz Rogowski), an angry young alcoholic. She also houses her younger brother Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz) with his second wife and their baby.

The latest addition to this dysfunctional ménage is Eve (Fantine Harduin), Thomas’s 12-year-old daughter by his first marriage. Eve is the story’s eyes and ears. The opening sequence is shot on her smartphone as, from an appraising distance, she live-streams her mother’s baptismal rites in the bathroom, adding mordant captions: ‘rinser … gargariser… pisser’. The mother — we never see her face — is a pill addict who soon overdoses. Eve, who has already lost a brother, is cast out of her home in sunny southerly Arles and exiled to a chilly family in the north.

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