by: Letitia
Posted on 11.24.09 in All Horror Films > Exploitation > Thriller/Suspense
Release Date: 2007

If you take Funny Games (2007) as a critique of violence in American films, as director Michael Haneke has claimed he intended, then it’s a hypocritical failure—a two-hour exercise in luring the viewer with violence and then critiquing the viewer for being lured. Fortunately, the English version of Funny Games (a shot-by-shot remake of Haneke’s original German-language version), has much more going on than a tired critique of violence.

It’s hard to characterize Funny Games.The plot is bare-bones—an upper-class family is terrorized by two strangers for no apparent reason. Very little violence happens onscreen, which will disappoint viewers who are expecting the now-familiar gore of torture movies. So what makes this a horror movie and not a thriller? The real horror in this movie is in seeing the characters (Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, most notably) suffer for no discernible reason and feeling similarly trapped in a world that looks normal but doesn’t seem to work by the usual film rules.

One of the reasons why I love horror movies so much is that things don’t have to turn out all right—we expect things to go bad and stay bad. But Funny Games doesn’t even follow normal horror movie narratives, which makes it far more terrifying than many movies I’ve seen lately. It reveals how breakable the rules really are and how much we rely on them to get through what otherwise would be intolerable to watch onscreen. When Haneke yanks the rug out from under his characters, he does it to the viewer, too.

In Funny Games, the terrorizing strangers are young, upper-class men dressed completely in white. They are well-spoken, painfully polite, and seemingly completely reasonable, which makes their actions all the more confusing and frightening for the viewer. Michael Pitt, the more vocal of the two, is an amazing villain. Soft-spoken, polite, and completely calm, Pitt is void of any characteristics of a real person. He has no name, no motivation for his actions, and no purpose in carrying them out. The lack of motivation becomes a part of the movie when Pitt and his accomplice, Brady Corbett, play with different explanations for their behavior. Were they abused by their parents? Are they psychotic? With each new explanation, the idea of explaining away their behavior becomes more and more ridiculous. Explanations are what keep the viewer from realy experiencing what is horrifying—Haneke doesn’t let the viewer escape behind reasons.

The plot of the movie isn’t important, and you’ve seen it before—The Strangers, Them, and pretty much every other home-invasion movie ever made. What Haneke does differently here is toy with the way that these movies usually unfold. Heanke often has Pitt’s character directly face the camera and comment on the scene, asking the viewer who their sympathies are with or what they expect to happen next. In one pivotal scene, when things don’t go quite as the villains have planned, Pitt’s character actually rewinds the movie and changes a scene. This kind of “fourth wall” move is familiar in art-house films, but in applying it to a genre movie, Haneke shows how much we rely on the orderly worlds that directors create to guide us through even the most harrowing and terrifying experiences.

In Funny Games, conventions are stretched and reveal that the director is in complete control. The viewer is dragged along, foiled at every turn, and asked to accept the completely irrational and disordered world that Haneke has created. Funny Games might not be the scariest movie you’ll see, but it will probably linger with you long after the credits roll.

• ★★★★★

  Acting:

• ★★★★★

  Blood:

• ★★★★★

  Violence:

• ★★★★★

  Partying:

• ★★★★★

  Language:

• ★★★★★

  Humor:

• ★★★★★

  Predictable:

• ★★★★★

  Girls:

• ★★★★★

  Gore:

• ★★★★★

  Sexuality:

• ★★★★★

  Torture:

• ★★★★★

  Overall: