02/04/2025 - A failed music star comes back to her hometown and to the life she left behind in Evi Romen’s sophomore directorial effort

It would be a relatively typical story: a woman prioritises her ambition over loyalty, relationships, friendships and family, leaves town and goes off to make it on her own in the “big, wide world” but ultimately fails, so she has to come back and face the music. Make no mistake, it would be different if that woman were a man because in movies, men get a shot at redemption, while women do not – the best they can hope for is some leniency from their milieu.

An individual’s dealing with the setting of a small town was also the topic of the directorial debut by editor Evi Romen, Why Not You [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2020), but that movie revolved around a younger male protagonist and the trauma he survived but cannot exactly be open about. In Happyland, however, we have a woman as the protagonist and failure as the reason for her return. It has premiered at the Diagonale (where it won Best Original Score in a Fiction Feature into the bargain – see the news), and although it’s scheduled for national distribution this spring, its chances of international festival travel are slim.

Helen (Andrea Wenzl) is a stylish failure with a larger-than-life artistic ego. After causing the last in a string of scandals in London, she jumps in her Jaguar and drives back to her hometown in Lower Austria, where her mother (Michaela Rosen) owns the titular sports centre. Helen’s future is to manage it in a town inhabited by her die-hard fans as well as people she has crossed, such as her former friends and bandmates.

However, the appearance of an impossibly cool young man named Joe (Simon Frühwirth, the star of Gregor Schmidinger’s 2019 title Nevrland [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) rocks her world. He comes to her place of work as a candidate for the position of rock-climbing instructor, while he also plays drums with her former bandmates – but his true passion are horses, so his dream is to establish his own ranch. Maybe now would be the right time for Helen to have a serious conversation with her former partner Tom (Michael Pink) in order to learn something about the mysterious young man she is about to fall for.

The script, written by Romen herself, relies too heavily on an attempt to keep the “elephant in the room” under wraps for long enough so that the ultimate revelation will have the right impact. However, the dilemma is “phoned in” early on, so more seasoned viewers can easily guess what is at stake here. Also, the filmmaker’s ethics could be viewed as more than a tad conservative, since her protagonist is being punished for expressing her ambition, while illogically assuming that nobody from her social circle has ever travelled or lived outside of the town.

On the other hand, as a director, Romen manages to overcome these obstacles to a certain extent. She has a knack for nailing the small-town atmosphere, bristling with open secrets and petty feuds. Also, she grasps the trajectory of a (failed) musician’s career path from some kind of artsy, punk-rock scene to harbouring singer-songwriter ambitions. The choice of music and the inclusion of quasi-archival footage in appropriate formats is also quite fitting. Furthermore, Romen manages to get the actors in a very playful mode, and Wenzl uses her theatre chops to construct the big-screen role of her career. In the end, Happyland attains the level of a solid movie that has the potential to talk to regular audiences.

Happyland is an Austrian-Belgian co-production by Amour Fou Vienna and Take Five.