With Funny Games, notoriously bleak Austrian director Michael Haneke (Hidden) remakes his 1997 'intellectual horror" film, recasting it in an American context and reproducing the original’s maddening, troubling self-reflexive gestures shot for shot. The premise is simple: a bourgeois family (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and their son, Devon Gearhart) is held captive by two spooky young men (Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet) in their own home. The family endures torture – psychological, emotional, and physical – for the edification of their captors, who refer to all this mayhem as 'games".
There’s a lot of suspense in the conventional sense – scary sequences of stalkers tracking the innocent set in over-sized houses, lonely roads at night – all spun around a plot that asks teasingly 'who will survive and how?" There’s also a lot of violence, though significantly most of it happens off screen. It doesn’t take a PhD in film to figure out what is really going on in Haneke’s construction here; he is in effect retreading Alfred Hitchcock’s accusation that the filmic form disassociates us from the bloodshed that it so often portrays, tapping our voyeuristic tendencies at the same time as encouraging our lusts and desires (see Rear Window). Or to put it another way, we like our violence only when it can never really touch us.
As an experiment in film form, Funny Games is intriguing, but the self-congratulation and post-modern trickery are at once irksome and intellectually and artistically dishonest. Haneke’s approach is cool and ironic to be sure, but his conceit collapses under close scrutiny. The horror movie set pieces here carry the same kind of visceral jolt held precious by fan-boys and girls everywhere. The only difference is, in this funny game we ain’t supposed to enjoy it.
This highly self-reflexive anti-thriller from Austrian director Michael Haneke is conceited and contrived, though as an experiment and comment on filmmaking itself, it’s at least remotely interesting.
Filmink 2.5/5
