User Reviews

"Een Ander Zijn Geluk" (a.k.a. "Someone Else's Happiness") has received an enormous amount of acclaim at several prestigious international film festivals, but failed to make a big impression on critics and audiences in Belgium, its country of origin. That is particularly unfortunate since this excellent film marks the discovery of a truly gifted new filmmaker, a young woman named Fien Troch. In terrific cinemascope compositions, she paints a portrait of what happens in a small town community when a child is killed in a hit-and-run accident. This is a film filled with silences, but it manages to convey a heartwrenching sense of human sadness regardless of its lack of emotional outbursts or big dramatic moments. The ensemble cast shines in doing the most with a minimum of dialogue and really turns this bleak and potentially overly distant tale into a gripping illustration of human loneliness, isolation and inability to communicate. When David Eugene Edwards' beautifully tormented end credits song kicks in, you know you've seen something special. "Een Ander Zijn Geluk" reminded me of Atom Egoyan's and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu's best work, and since it is Belgium's entry for the 2007 Academy Awards I wish it the best of luck - it deserves the highest praise.

Very good first film, «Someone Else's Happiness» tells parallel stories in several homes of a Belgian rural community, all centered around the death of a boy, hit by an anonymous driver. The characters include the parents of the dead kid, a housewife whose husband is acting strange; a woman that is divorcing from a husband who is constantly announcing his suicide; her chatty mother and nutty sisters, policemen, a psychotic neighbor, a mechanic, an ex-wrestler, many kids, a dog and the ghost of the dead kid. There are two or three suspects of the hit-and-run killing, all with very unstable behaviors, immersed in mysterious personal dramas. Different persons cry every now and then, out of unhappiness, but they never fall into long psychological speeches, they just go along with their lives.

The strange combination in the movie is Peter Van Laerhoven's fine score, that keeps moving the story into thriller territory, and Fien Troch's direction, which is strongly rooted in the aesthetics of observational art cinema. I first saw her third feature, the remarkable« Kid», about a little boy who struggles against the dissociation of his family unit. With these two films, along with «Home» (2016), Troch reveals herself as an interesting filmmaker, concerned with themes and situations related to family, children and adolescence, from a different point of view, showing the evidence of alienation and social disintegration, avoiding the trap of melodrama. I highly recommend her movies, for they are fine examples of good, alternative cinema.