The mattress thumps. Luna (Gaite Jansen) is jumping on it, and over the noise her voiceover gives the verdict: “That was my 132nd fake orgasm.” Decider reads the scene as irony, since all that racket implies a hot sex life and the truth runs the other way. It adds that Mink (Martijn Lakemeier) is standing outside, working out how loud the two of them can get. Joosje Duk’s Happy Ending opens with a gag at its heroine’s expense, and the gag works. It also sets a tone the film never quite settles, with dark comedy on top and a sincere romance underneath.

Luna and Mink have been together a year. According to Decider, they met working at the same beachside bar, they dance and drink and go to dress-up dinner parties with friends, and she has moved in with him. The film wants us to like them, and it succeeds, which is the whole trouble. Neither of them is written as a villain. One night Mink finishes and Luna goes through the motions. Once he is out cold, she slips into the bathroom, opens the little soap box and takes out her vibrator to finish the job herself. Decider describes that beat, and it is the saddest and funniest thing in the setup, because the secrecy clearly costs her real effort.

Her answer arrives with a gift. For the anniversary, a friend gives the couple fluffy handcuffs, and the idea of a third person in their bed follows from there (Decider). At a restaurant, a waiter mentions a mocktail called “trio” and Luna casually brings up a threesome with Mink. He hesitates, then agrees, according to The Movie Culture. Common Sense Media is blunt about the motive: she persuades him into it without telling him the real reason. A woman who cannot say “this isn’t working for me” proposes the most complicated alternative to saying it.

The hunt for a partner gives the film its most openly comic stretch. Decider calls the nightclub sequence comical, and The Movie Culture adds that Luna cannot flirt to save her life. The scene is built on a woman who hides everything trying to look like she hides nothing, and the awkwardness is the point. Jansen carries all of this. Ready Steady Cut praises a lovely central performance that brings complexity to Luna while staying comically light, and that matches the job as I see it. She has to play someone who is lying in every scene and still be a person we want to spend ninety minutes with. She never plays Luna as a schemer. When the character makes choices that provoke argument, as that review puts it, Jansen keeps her recognisable.

Then Eve (Joy Delima) arrives. In The Movie Culture’s account, Luna first trades glances with her on one of her bike rides, then finds her on a dating app and arranges a meeting. The couple make their offer, Eve accepts, and the threesome follows. The detail I keep returning to, which the same review notes, is that Eve asks Luna what she prefers in sex. Luna and Mink have never talked about it, not once in a year. One question from a stranger does what twelve months of faking could not. Luna’s first climax comes from Eve, not from Mink. From there the plot does what the premise promises. Luna keeps fantasising about Eve and travels to her place, while Mink, in Ready Steady Cut’s words, remains oblivious to her sexual needs.

On Luna’s silence, the critics split. Decider finds the protagonist frustrating because she is frustrated and won’t do anything about it. She could fix this by speaking, and the reviewer all but shouts at the screen. It is a fair reaction and I had it too. But the film’s subject is exactly that paralysis. The longer Luna waits, the more expensive the truth becomes, and Decider itself concedes how hard it is to tell a partner of a year that you have been faking all along, and calls her situation a genie she can’t get back in the bottle. The film is on firmer ground when it treats her silence as fear than when it treats it as a gag. Common Sense Media is less forgiving. It calls Luna dishonest, resentful and finally angry, notes that she also cheats on Mink, and says he is understandably angry that she withheld the problem for so long. That is a verdict aimed at parents, but it names the moral knot of the story: the threesome is a detour around the one sentence she needed to say.

One review reads Happy Ending as a story about sexual identity taking shape, and asks whether Luna’s feelings for Eve are validated or simply arrive because of what she lacks with Mink. A Medium essay puts Luna’s personal journey at the centre of the film. A piece titled Luna’s Silent Scream says the film stands apart from recent pictures about open relationships because it cares about the emotional side rather than the physical. Ready Steady Cut agrees from another angle. Any synopsis centres on the threesome, it says, but the threesome is really a way into an honest and humorous look at female desire and sexual satisfaction. I think that is the correct reading. Eve and the threesome move the story along, but the story itself is about what Luna has never been able to say.

Rotten Tomatoes’ write-up is harsher. It finds the pacing slow and calls the mix of romance, drama and comedy confusing and unsatisfying. That complaint has substance. The picture does slide between registers, and a viewer who arrives for a sex comedy gets something more bruised. Ready Steady Cut makes the opposite case. It says the genre label sets up one expectation, and the film turns out tender-hearted and unexpectedly bittersweet, with Duk directing with a light touch while taking the story seriously. It also says the ninety minutes never outstay their welcome. I side with the second reading on running time and with the first on focus. The film is short enough that its uncertainty never becomes tedious, but a film this short could still decide what it is.

The sex is frank. Ready Steady Cut says the dialogue and the scenes of sexual activity never feel gratuitous, and that the film doesn’t flinch from home truths about how society looks upon female and male pleasure. Common Sense Media, writing for parents, lists what to expect. The threesome is shown, two women have sex with breasts visible, the language is strong, and the film is in Dutch with English subtitles. Nothing in either account suggests the explicitness is there to titillate. An IMDb viewer calls the dialogue authentic and honest, and says the only reason not to recommend the film is discomfort with the subject. Ready Steady Cut stresses that the film is filtered through a female lens, and that matters. Luna’s pleasure is the point of the story, not its garnish.

Lakemeier has the thankless role. Mink is game for the threesome once he gets over his hesitation, and in Decider’s telling he thinks Luna is singing “Erotic City” when she is really singing “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The reviewer made that joke at Mink’s expense, and it lands because it captures the gap between them. Nothing in the reviews describes him as neglectful. Decider says the pair looked, and still look, very cute together. As the reviews portray him, he is not a bad boyfriend but an uninformed one. Ready Steady Cut notes that he remains oblivious to her needs, and that leaves Luna with nobody to blame for the gap except her own silence.

Happy Ending is uneven and sometimes exasperating, and it is better than its premise. Jansen is the reason to watch. Duk’s light touch is the reason it works at all, and her attention to a woman’s desire is exactly what Ready Steady Cut singles out as the film’s strength. The slow stretches and the indecision about genre are real flaws, and Rotten Tomatoes is right to name them. They do not sink a film that understands how a small lie, repeated 132 times, can grow too big to retract. The number Luna keeps count of in her head is its best joke and its saddest line.