Michael Haneke | 2017 | France | Austria | 107’

Isabelle Huppert stars in what is both an austere and darkly comic family drama, and a scathing commentary about the kind of world our children are living in. Either way, Happy End is stunning cinema, a satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity, a family drama set in Calais with the European refugee crisis for a backdrop. For the often-challenging Michael Haneke, it’s familiar themes pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls; family dysfunction, inter-generational revenge, the poisonous suppression of guilt and the return of the repressed are all here.