“The equilibrium achieved between A Happy Family’s visual, writerly and actorly storytelling is just what is needed in order for its more extreme moments to land successfully.”

In what might be a typical breakfast for Niki and her children Leonie and Jimmy, nothing has been going smoothly so far.  As Jimmy and Leonie pull pre-sliced cheese from its packaging, Jimmy complains that the bread Niki has laid out is hard as a rock. Niki pivots to serving them corn flakes, but Leonie points out that they have no milk presently. “You always eat them dry,” Niki tries to reason. As she encourages them to eat, the children realize they are running late for school, and as they prepare to leave the camera pans to follow them. This is the moment when the audience realizes that a case worker has been sitting in a corner, quietly observing. “Leonie, come here: would you say this was an ordinary breakfast?” the case worker inquires, to which Jimmy interjects, “We never have breakfast!” A cut to the title card reveals that director Jan-Eric Mack has been literally and metaphorically setting the table for us to ponder what A Happy Family means, given that we’ve just witnessed breadcrumbs for an exploration of the difficulties facing a single mother of limited resources trying to provide the best possible life for her two young children.

Niki holds two jobs: by day she works in a laundry plant, and on Friday and Saturday she works overnight in the cloakroom of a nightclub. She’s even taking a retail sales course at night so that she won’t always have to be spreading herself as thin as she has been recently. But resources are always tight, and because she has debts totaling 70,000 Swiss Francs, her wages are being seized to pay off these debts; that leaves her with no expendable cash for luxuries, or even the bare necessities required to raise two children under ten years old. This means that she’s scarcely able to put together nutritious meals for her family, while socially appropriate wardrobes (a knock-off sports jersey that she gives Jimmy for his birthday is correctly identified as such, and publicly blasted by one of his classmates) which would protect the kids from bullying at school are completely off the table. An informal follow-up visit with the social worker reveals that Jimmy doesn’t have a suitable winter wardrobe to protect him from the elements or illnesses, and he’s been falling asleep and unable to remain focused on the curriculum during class. Leonie is “being assessed” because she recently got into a fight at school. The social worker’s tone and delivery are as warm and sympathetic as they could be in the context of this conversation, but she warns Niki that if things continue on the current trajectory, child protective services will have to take more serious measures. Her life circumstances are presently a tinderbox, ominously ready for the wrong spark at the wrong time to set everything she’s worked for ablaze.

That spark, quite literally, turns out to be when nine-year-old Leonie (who supervises Jimmy as Niki works her weekend shifts at the nightclub) accidentally starts a kitchen fire in her efforts to prepare a meal for her younger brother. Unsurprisingly, this was the final straw, and the children are taken into the custody of child protective services and will be in foster care until further notice. The case workers berate Niki for her negligence, particularly indignant because they’ve already offered her extra support, which of course would be subtracted from what little is left of her wages by the debt office. At this juncture, the wellbeing of her children or even knowledge of where they’ve been rehoused is completely out of her hands.

Never is even one minute of A Happy Family’s screentime wasted, and even though the remainder of the film is super-saturated with enough constantly evolving plot points to provide content for multiple films, the progression somehow feels natural, realistic, and unhurried. Furthermore, the depiction of Niki’s many eventual setbacks, breakdowns and surrenders to impulse could have felt grotesque or hyperbolic. It never does thanks to Anna Schinz, a contributor to the film’s screenplay on top of being its lead actor. Her performance feels so intimately attuned to the material, and her expression of each one of Niki’s acts of desperation seems sincere and less unhinged than expected; this makes the intense depictions of her struggles feel earned and justified. There’s no question that this mother is willing to go to any extreme necessary in trying to reconnect with her children, whether that means breaking into an office to discover their current address, or assuming a false identity along with a forged resume in order to get work as a cleaning lady in her children’s new school.

It’s also easy to be swept away by the crisp clarity of A Happy Family’s unexpectedly polished visual language. Other directors of working-class family dramas might have chosen a hand-held or grainy visual approach in mounting their films, but thankfully Mack has conceived a vision that is a relief to the eyes, without feeling overly glossy. One standout moment depicts Niki sitting in the wreckage of singed textiles and soot after the fire in her kitchen, seen with a cigarette between her fingers for the first time. This is a beautifully composed and meaningful transitional shot before she is about to find herself at the center of many extraordinary dilemmas. The equilibrium achieved between A Happy Family’s visual, writerly and actorly storytelling is just what is needed in order for its more extreme moments to land successfully, reminding the audience to focus on its most important message: poverty has nothing to do with character, and even the most advanced, developed, and civilized societies can sometimes let down the people in their margins.