“Happy End is a satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity: as stark, brilliant and unforgiving as a halogen light. The movie rehearses almost all of director Michael 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.
“Often Haneke’s cinema is a cousin to conventional horror, conventional thrillers. Happy End is no exception. It is almost a genre movie. But the genre is that of Haneke’s own invention. It is unmistakably his work, presented with his usual masterly compositional flair, a mosaic of horror, filmed by cinematographer Christian Berger in crystal-clear light, often with icily detached long-shot camera positions. This is a black comedy of pure sociopathy.” The Gaurdian
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