Family’s privilege doesn’t spare it from misery

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, except perhaps in the films of Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke — in which domestic misery tends to express itself as repetitive, even ritualistic patterns.

Haneke has turned the repetition into a joke of sorts: In most of his films, you are likely to encounter the names Georges and Anne (or Georg and Anna) and maybe the face of his frequent on-screen muse, the brilliant French actress Isabelle Huppert.

The forces bedeviling these families vary in nature — an apocalyptic disaster in “Time of the Wolf,” inexplicable suicidal urges in “The Seventh Continent,” memories of past transgressions in “Cache.”

If you see enough of them, Theatre

you soon realize that every tormentor is a front for Haneke himself.

Nearly all of his films are predicated on a kind of home invasion.

No locks get broken in Haneke’s “Happy End,” an unhappy-family drama every bit as devious as its pokerfaced title.

The film represents a more playful, slippery version of a story that Haneke has never really stopped telling: Steadily and ruthlessly, he chips away at an upperclass Western family whose members are ensconced in their own privilege.

The Laurents are a multigenerational clan living in a large house in the French coastal city of Calais. The patriarch is Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a widower just shy of his 85th birthday.

His brittle, exceedingly competent daughter, Anne (Huppert), runs the family’s construction business and tries to groom her volatile man-child son, Pierre (Franz Rogowski), for a prominent role in the company.

Anne’s weaker-willed brother, Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), is a doctor with a wife, Anaïs (Laura Verlinden), and an infant son.

We meet the Laurents in the context of two crises: A wall collapses at a company construction site, injuring an employee. And Thomas’ 13-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Eve (Fantine Harduin), moves in with them after her mother falls gravely ill.

Both inciting tragedies are shown, or at least suggested, by a secondary camera. The sense of chilly, detached observation persists inside the Laurents’ home, where no tragedy seems capable of disrupting the family’s routine.

Unfolding as a series of brisk, meticulously composed, perfectly acted scenes held together with little or no exposition, “Happy End” is diffuse in its storytelling — no single character emerges as the protagonist.

Again and again, the director sows seeds of dread and disaster, only to uproot them before they can blossom into full-on horror. Tension convulses the picture whenever Eve, a disaffected teen played with breathtaking poise by Harduin, finds herself alone with her baby brother.

If “Happy End” is something of a bad-seed nightmare, though, it turns out to be an unpredictable one, marked by unexpected flashes of warmth, sympathy and blistering humor.

A curious bond develops between Eve and her grandfather, Georges — one predicated not on love or affection but on a mutual disdain for the adults around them as well as a shared suspicion that life might not be worth living.

Haneke has often been dinged as both a punishing moralist and a perversely withholding storyteller. So it’s fitting that his masterstroke in “Happy End,” delivered almost with a shrug, is the withholding of punishment.

A more redemptive, politically righteous movie might have held its characters to account for their callous indifference.