Happy End

Happy End (2017) is an Austrian-French-German drama you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Michael Haneke. The film follows a wealthy bourgeois family in Calais — the Laurents — whose construction business, polished interiors, and dinner-table manners conceal a collective indifference so thorough it tips into something darker. Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Mathieu Kassovitz lead the ensemble.

Elderly patriarch Georges wants to die and goes about it with quiet determination. His daughter Anne runs the company and has no illusions about anyone, including herself. Son Thomas has just started a new life while burying the wreckage of the old one. And a twelve-year-old granddaughter watches the whole arrangement with an unsettling clarity that no one in the family seems to notice. A few miles away, migrants wait in camps — but none of this registers for the Laurents.

Haneke refuses to moralize. He observes. The ironic title is the clearest editorial comment he makes. This is a slow, deliberately cold film, and if you come to it expecting warmth or resolution you will be disappointed. Come to it expecting rigour and a filmmaker who trusts you to connect the dots, and it lands. Stream Happy End (2017) online on iFILM.