REVIEW: Funny Games (2007, dir. Michael Haneke)

Perhaps I was over-prepared for Funny Games. When Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own 1997 film first hit theaters, I read a review—I can’t recall where—that made me simultaneously terrified and curious to see it. It sounded like a fascinating formal experiment, but something I might not have the stomach to sit through. A post on Stacie Ponder’s Final Girl blog made me rethink this hesitation, since she indicated that the film did most of its damage off-screen. I became increasingly interested as I read more about Haneke’s body of work. Ultimately, Haneke’s original Austrian version sat on my Netflix queue for some time, until I came across the English version last night on HBO. I came in at about the halfway point, but I was riveted for the remainder of the movie and promptly TiVo’d the whole thing so I could watch the beginning of it right away.

There is something to be said for a movie that grabs you and shakes you even after its been relentlessly spoiled by multiple reviews and viewed out of sequence. The film details the brutal torment of a family at the hands of two young men, played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet. Michael Pitt’s character, variously referred to as Paul, Jerry and Butt-Head, repeatedly breaks the fourth wall and interfaces with the audience, who are as much his prisoners as the defenseless family. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth give moving performances as two people destroyed by tragedy, but as expected and feared, the real star of the movie is, well, the movie itself.

Pitt and Corbet are cartoon caricatures of serial killers, even going so far as to title themselves after the jaded perpetual observers Beavis and Butt-Head. They’re colder and less specifically satirical than American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman; they are actually most reminiscent of Mister Croup and Mister Vandemar, the archetypal bogeymen from Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel Neverwhere. They are destroying people’s lives out of an adolescent impulse, as well as a repeatedly declared desire to “entertain.” Who, exactly, do they wish to entertain? That would be you, puny viewer. The movie plays constantly with the ethical problem of finding entertainment in the torture of innocent people.

The film’s heavy-handedness could be debated endlessly, but the film gets a couple things very right. For one, it’s scarier than a lot of horror films, favoring pacing over splatter. Long, tense shots with maybe one or two points of movement dominate the middle part of the film, and multiple acts of cruelty are synthesized through off-camera sounds of anguish. Also, it has a mightily unsettling opening sequence, where a cheerful, entirely un-ominous family car ride featuring a (funny?) game of Guess What Opera We’re Listening To is unceremoniously torn asunder by a maddening burst of shrieky music by John Zorn’s Naked City ensemble. Here's the scene:



It’s hard to imagine sitting through the original version of the film anytime soon, but now I’ve broken through to the world of Haneke, I’ll probably seek out Caché and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Funny Games is a blistering style piece, whether or not you’re on board with its didactic element.

Image source: Mark O'Sullivan