You won’t hear a whole lot of laughter during Funny Games, Austrian director Michael Haneke’s painstaking American remake of his 1997 home-invasion meta-thriller. Stick around to the end, though, and the theater will surely become a cacophony of wails, curses and angry WTFs, as people slowly begin to realize that they haven’t so much watched a movie as been subjected to a sadistic psychological experiment. I’ve given the film a high rating because there’s no getting around its excellence, provided that you admire what Haneke’s set out to accomplish: Like the original, it’s a uniquely nerve-shredding and thought-provoking treatise on screen violence, one explicitly designed to make you feel uncomfortable about your own voyeuristic bloodlust. But to say that this movie isn’t for everybody is a gross understatement. Only if you relish having your expectations thwarted and your convictions challenged should you even consider buying a ticket—and even then, beware. I put the original on my 1998 Top 10 list, but it took me almost 10 years to work up the courage to sit through it a second time.
Haneke’s scenario is diabolically simple—indeed, the whole point is that it barely qualifies as a “story” at all. Arriving one sunny afternoon at their summer home in the Hamptons, an affluent and from all appearances perfectly normal family—Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as Mom and Dad, Devon Gearhart as their towheaded pre-teen son—notices a pair of young men in tennis whites chatting with their neighbors. Before long, this obsequious duo (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet), who variously refer to themselves as Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butt-head, show up at the house, ostensibly to borrow some eggs. Turns out they’re much more interested in the family’s golf clubs and kitchen knives. A wager is proposed: “You bet that you’ll be alive tomorrow at nine o’clock, and we bet that you’ll be dead.” Why are they torturing these poor people? Why, for our own delectation, of course, as Pitt’s smiling killer makes clear in a series of knowing winks and quick asides delivered directly to the camera lens.
It’s remarkable that Haneke first conceived of Funny Games long before the current wave of so-called “torture porn” movies that kicked into gear with the Saw and Hostel franchises—that it was an anticipation rather than (as it now seems) a response. Not that this is a gorefest, by any means. Haneke—an ice-cold theoretician whose other notable films include Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher and Caché—is far too elegant for that, preferring to keep the worst violence offscreen. But he’s more than happy to inflict abuse upon us, the viewing audience. In the movie’s coup de grâce, he provides the dramatic catharsis we’ve been eagerly awaiting, only to immediately retract it in the most surreal and preposterous way imaginable—the film-theory equivalent of “na na na na na na!” Even the casting of a glamorous star like Watts, in lieu of the original’s somewhat dowdy Susanne Lothar, seems expressly designed to mess with our heads. Surely he wouldn’t do that to our Naomi?!
Rest assured: He would. In truth, the only rational and sane response to Funny Games is to wonder why the hell you didn’t walk out in disgust—in other words, to question just what development you were hoping for that would somehow justify the project’s wanton sadism. If that doesn’t strike you as a worthwhile enterprise (or if all you seek is an evening’s light entertainment), think twice about going. Many folks will be offended, or just exasperated, by Haneke’s scolding, moralistic tone, and by his clear suggestion that we as a culture are no better than the malevolent predators up on the screen. But the original Funny Games got under my skin like few other movies ever have—not just due to the moral questions it inspires (though I was genuinely alarmed at one point to find myself hoping for the killers to return, out of a desire for narrative closure), but also because it’s simply a superlative example of horror filmmaking, shot with a terrible precision that keeps you in a constant state of paralyzing anxiety. The American remake almost literally duplicates the Austrian version, to the point where it looks as if Watts and Roth & Co. have been digitally inserted into the original film. For better or for worse—that’s for you to decide—Haneke clearly felt he got it right the first time.
Funny Games
****
Naomi Watts, Tim Roth,
Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet
Directed by Michael Haneke
Rated R