Avaliações do Metacritic

The film can be unrelenting: Several graphic scenes make it challenging to watch, and more than once, I caught myself holding my breath. As the story’s weeks stretch into months, you can see the tension gather in Anne’s piercing gaze. It’s as if her eyes might set the screen aflame with her frustration, fury, and—eventually—panic.

The result is difficult to watch yet impossible to turn away from, the legitimacy of its naked honesty seeping from every rough corner and crevice of the production.

More than anything else, Diwan seems interested in exploring how, at many points in history, young women had no choice but to bear this particular burden alone.

Happening is filmed and performed in such a delicate, skin-soft register, meanwhile, that the escalating terror of Anne’s situation is all the more pronounced, eventually pivoting into a realm of wholly realism-based body horror.

While her aesthetic may boast some grander flourishes than Hittman’s neorealism, there is nevertheless a vérité style to Diwan’s approach that places us right up against Anne for the majority of the film — a tight, boxed aspect ratio leads to the feeling of the walls closing in, her panic setting in just underneath the surface, observed in oft-used closeups of Vartolomei’s expressive face.

Adapted from Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel, the film plays its private trauma as a harrowing thriller, and showcases a superb performance from Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne Duchesne, the agonised student in the spotlight.

Happening is often a tough watch, compassionate but brutally honest, and almost breathless in its chronicle of a struggle that has obviously stayed with the author for decades.

Deftly adapted by director Audrey Diwan from a novella, Happening is a period piece, but it’s acted and shot with a shivery immediacy.

This period drama manages the difficult task of speaking to our current moment without being didactic or preachy.

There’s a slight lack of dramatic tension in much of the lead-up to its harrowing finale, with too much weight placed on the capable shoulders of the French-Romanian actress Anamaria Vartolomei.