Master auteur Michael Haneke (Amour, The White Ribbon, Hidden) returns with a biting satire on bourgeois family values set in the shadow of the European refugee crisis. Featuring a cast of top acting talent, including Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz and Toby Jones, it’s a piercing dark comedy on the blind preoccupations of middle-class angst. When her mother falls ill under mysterious circumstances, young Eve (Fantine Harduin) is sent to live with her estranged father’s relatives in Calais. The Laurent family – wealthy, neurotic and self-obsessed – own a lucrative construction company and live in a sprawling mansion house, waited on by servants. But trouble is brewing, as a series of intergenerational back-stabbings threaten to tear the family apart. Meanwhile, distracted by infidelities and betrayals, they fail to notice that their new arrival has a sinister secret of her own. Nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Happy End bears all the hallmarks of Haneke’s uniquely stark and unsympathetic style. Pairing pitch-black humour with chillingly precise direction, it’s proof – if we ever needed it – that he remains one of modern cinema’s true visionaries.

***

It hardly needs saying that the adjective in the title is about as accurate as the one in Haneke’s Funny Games. Happy End is a satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity: as stark, brilliant and unforgiving as a halogen light. It is not a new direction for this film-maker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.

The movie rehearses almost all of Haneke’s classic themes and visual ideas: family dysfunction, inter-generational revenge, the poisonous suppression of guilt and the return of the repressed. There is the horror of death combined with a Thanatos-like longing for its deliverance – one line in particular shows how Happy End has been inspired by the climactic moment of his previous film, Amour.

There is the distinctive preoccupation with surveillance and video recording as technologically unsparing moral reproaches to what we choose not to see in our own behavior. And Haneke combines this with a new interest in the affectless visual texture of social-media livestreaming, instant messaging, and YouTube supercuts.

Excerpt from TheGuardian located HERE

1080P Dual-layered Blu-ray MPEG-4 AVC Video

Edition Details:
• Making of (21:10)
• MasterClass with Haneke (1:36:28)
• Trailer (1:38)

Blu-ray  Release Date: March 26th, 2018
Standard Blu-ray case