The first sequences, shot with a cell phone, document daily acts and the murder of a hamster.

Thus begins the story of the Laurent family.

Once upon a time in France, in Calais, an upper-class interior.

Eve, nearly thirteen, is losing her mother to an overdose of psychotropic drugs.

She is taken to her father Thomas's house, who has since remarried Anais, has another child, and maintains a high-octane virtual erotic relationship.

Eve's aunt runs, along with her son, a large industrial construction company: an accident at a construction site causes the death of a worker.

In the same house also lives the grandfather, who apparently remembers nothing but knows well how to try to end his life.

Through a masterful screenplay, Haneke manages to obscure any significant evidence that might seem immediate.

He shifts, dilates, fragments, breaks, rejoins, and disarranges, depicting unsettling scenes of an alienated intergenerational fresco, in which the oldest and the youngest, alone, maintain a lucid and analytical gaze.

As in Benny's Video and Cachè, technology is a protagonist: one wouldn't understand the disintegrating contemporaneity without the pervasiveness of tools that are now the DNA of our existences.

It's not so much the disconnection from the surrounding world that interests this scientific observation of the upper-middle class as the estrangement from oneself and the inability to understand the meaning of familial, social, and human realities adrift in irreversible psychopathological declines.

Eve's grandfather killed his wife by suffocating her out of excessive love (Amour) and now wants to end it all out of disgust; all strong, overwhelming feelings permeate his existence, now reeking of useless and petty lives; only Eve can help him, only she, the last generation degenerated into the abyss of apathy as a defense mechanism against absurd insignificance.

Eve lacks common sense, Eve feels no emotions, she records and acts, as only someone who has seen every hope dashed regarding the possibility of finding meaning can. She lives in a state of inertia, a void full of renunciation, a kind of weightlessness of someone in a disused space, where there's no point in sending any message because there's no living soul to receive it.

Eve doesn't know why, only her "good" education keeps her emotional excesses in check, rendering even life indifferent: her lack of emotional growth makes her expressionless, non-reactive, events pass by her without real participation.

Only she can be the salvation of her grandfather, who, overwhelmed by his experiences, knows what it means to feel emotions, pains, joys, life, and precisely because of this, is nauseated by the radical loss of any interest in a decayed world.

Haneke's analytical mastery makes his cinema one of the most effective portrayals of a finished system.

Haneke no longer even wants to destabilize, and although he continues to uphold to exhaustion the trust placed in fiction, he becomes lighter, sarcastic, histrionic.

The snapshot is rather sober; there is a profound respect for receptive habituation; no alarmism, there is no hurry, it's not too late.

After all, time is up, the tape cannot be rewound, the The End this time will finally be the only possible expected Happy End of the story.

Exciting.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice