Warning: This post contains spoilers.
The film remains interesting, if not particularly eye-opening, until it reveals how all the characters are related. Once that happens it becomes the sort of sardonic chronicle of upper-middle-class discontentment that Claude Chabrol did much better and with far less portentousness. Isabelle Huppert plays Anne Laurent, the de facto head of an industrialist family in the northern French city of Calais. Her grown son, Pierre (Franz Rogowski), is a ne’er-do-well unwilling to take over the family business; her brother Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), a surgeon, is cheating on his wife while she nurses their newborn son; and her father, Georges (Trintignant), is a solitary misanthrope who dreams of suicide. All these characters live together in the same house, and Haneke stages some nicely discomforting shots of them sitting around the dinner table, each one nursing a personal obsession and never connecting with anyone else in the same room. (Haneke has long excelled in making people seem far apart while occupying the same shot—it’s one of his most frequently imitated stylistic signatures.)
