With Funny Games, the 1997 art-house which world premiered at the 1997 Cannes Film Fest, Michael Haneke indicted all those viewers who look toward violence and torture for their mass entertainment.
Genre: Invasion into House
Two pleasant-seeming psychotics enter the home of an affluent family and put them through a series of near-sickening games in which their lives are constantly on the line.
The psychotic boys intermittently address the audience, and even rewind the film at one point, suggesting that the viewers are in on their cruel activities and are rooting for them.
Haneke never faces his own place in the making of films that are mainly built on menace, fear, suffering and death.
Still, Funny Games is one of the filmmaker’s most disturbing works, alongside Cache, Code Unknown, and The White Ribbon.
Though his moral arguments are muddled, the power of his film’s visuals and the plot twists and turns both menacing and stunning.
Warning:
Stay away from the Hollywood remake, a pale feature which starred Naomi Watts.
Of Similar Interest:
The Desperate Hours (1955), Directed by William Wyler, Starring Humphrey Bogart
Recycling:
The 1955 movie was remade in 1990 as Desperate Hours, Michael Cimino’s inferior version, starring Mickey Rourke, Anthony Hopkins, Mimi Rogers, Kelly Lynch, Lindsay Crouse and David Morse.
The 1994 black comedy The Ref also features similar plot, with criminal on the lam (Denis Leary) taking a couple (Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis) hostage in their own home.
