Funny Games

[March 12th, 2008]

In 1997, Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Funny Games flew in the face of all expectation. The story of a bourgeois family taken hostage by two soft-spoken young psychopaths and subjected to psychological and physical torture is at once utterly hopeless and stressful, a sly comment on commodity violence and a film that defies convention. Haneke’s inglorious and realistic bloodshed gives nods to Straw Dogs-type isolationist terror, while his intelligent and gratingly polite villains are an obvious nod to Hitchcock. Funny Games is also rather ham-fisted in implicating the audience in its crimes: One of Haneke’s tormentors even winks at the camera and addresses the audience. It’s creepily effective, difficult to watch and impossible to look away from.

In 2008—the era of Eli Roth and Saw—a remake of Funny Games should be extra potent, especially with Haneke behind the camera and boasting a supreme cast. Indeed, the new Funny Games is just as good as the original. In fact, it’s almost exactly the same film, shot for shot. Vacationing rich folks are again greeted by a pair of well-mannered sociopaths (boyish Brady Corbet and the supremely disturbing Michael Pitt both emanate malice). The villains again wager that Mom (Naomi Watts), Dad (Tim Roth) and the young son will be dead by morning.

The leads handle the material well. Roth’s paternal anger and helplessness is palpable. As Mom, Watts—currently the queen of redux (with both episodes of The Ring, King Kong and a rumored stab at ruining The Birds on the way)—is heartbreaking. Nearly every performance is spot-on, as is the sparse cinematography and sound design, which uses silence as an implement of torture.

Just like in 1997.

Save for a pinch of extra subtlety, there’s nothing new here. The story is still genuinely creepy, but it also feels outdated by 11 years. Maybe it’s outdated because we’re more desensitized now than ever. Perhaps we’re just numb to this sort of thing, even when it’s self-aware and points a finger at us. Or maybe an arthouse film about senseless torture is still just a film about senseless torture.

Funny Games had interesting ideas in 1997, and scary ones to boot. But now—particularly if you’ve seen the original—it’s a little late to be playing these sorts of games with the audience, especially since Haneke, in making the same argument in the same exact manner, might now be fairly accused of exploiting the very cultural numbness he’s supposedly damning. It’s all Funny Games until somebody loses the point. R.