It’s hard to explic­itly say why Funny Games is a really great film with­out see­ing it. It’s basi­cally a film about non-sensical vio­lence that wants the viewer to feel bad for want­ing to see a film about non-sensical vio­lence. Michael Haneke recre­ates his 1997 film of the same name (this ver­sion being the Ger­man director’s first English-Speaking film). Prior to Funny Games the last Haneke film Amer­i­can audi­ences were able to enjoy was Caché, and if you’ve seen this film the pace and style of Funny Games will not sur­prise you. Of another inter­est­ing note this ver­sion of Funny Games is a shot-for-shot remake of his older film (an exer­cise in futil­ity as a film­maker I suppose).

Basi­cally Funny Games is about an afflu­ent fam­ily (Naomi Watts & Tim Roth, and son) who visit their vaca­tion house for a typ­i­cal week­end away. Upon arriv­ing to their gated com­mu­nity of other afflu­ent fam­i­lies Ann (Naomi Watts) rolls down her win­dow to shout out to a neigh­bor inquir­ing about their game of golf for the next day, the neigh­bor is accom­pa­nied by two young men dressed in all white golf clothes and acts very strange. A few scenes later after the fam­ily has arrived at their own home one of the young men has come to Ann’s door to ask to bor­row a few eggs for the other neigh­bor. The young man acts clum­sily and drops the eggs and ‘acci­dently’ drops Ann’s cell phone into a sink full of water. The young man now intro­duced as Peter (aka Tom, aka Beavis), acts very polite and apol­o­gizes for his clum­si­ness and pro­ceeds to ask for addi­tional eggs, Ann becom­ing very short obliges and whisks Peter away. All the while George (Tim Roth) and son Georgie are out­doors work­ing on their boat, and their dog is bark­ing non-stop. A few moments later the other young man from next door, Paul (aka Jerry, aka Butthead), appears at the door look­ing for Peter. Unknow­ingly Ann lets Paul inside to wait for Peter pri­mar­ily because Paul acts so politely and appears to be a nice young man.

With­out going into too much more detail a few scenes later Peter and Paul have com­pletely turned the tables and have basi­cally taken the fam­ily hostage in their own home by tak­ing a golf club to George’s leg, crip­pling the patri­arch and in the world of the film ren­der­ing the mother and son help­less (a point of con­tention for some viewers). After hold­ing the fam­ily hostage Peter & Paul announce that they are going to play a lit­tle game, and basi­cally bet that the fam­ily will not be alive 12 hours from now, and the fam­ily must bet that they will. So at it’s heart this film is sort of a home-invasion movie, but the trick to it all is that the vic­tims are only as help­less as they want to be. After this premise is revealed the plot sort of runs it’s course and other ter­ri­ble things hap­pen to the fam­ily. But what makes this film so bril­liant in this aspect is that the vio­lence doesn’t have a spe­cific pur­pose, it’s never revealed to the audi­ence why Peter & Paul want to inflict pain onto the fam­ily other than ‘just because’. This breaks the gen­eral pur­pose of a horror/suspense film genre in that we can’t blame or iden­tify with the antagonist’s for the bad they are doing. With­out being able to say ‘oh those guys are pure psy­chopaths who are only pure evil’ we as audi­ence mem­bers can’t feel sym­pa­thy for the vic­tims and root for the good guys to win.

Such unusual things as one of the antagonist’s walk­ing off screen to make a sand­wich while the other one shoots a fam­ily mem­ber is another very weird per­spec­tive often not seen in this genre. By Haneke pro­vid­ing these scenes between the scenes views of what might be hap­pen­ing off screen the film feels all the more ‘real’, which is another aspect that I feel is nec­es­sary to con­vey the mes­sage he is try­ing to pro­vide. Will you like this movie? Prob­a­bly not. Most peo­ple don’t because they go into the film think­ing it’s just going to be another horror/home-invasion movie and that the good guys will win, but they don’t. The film ends with­out the sat­is­fac­tion of any of the mod­ern struc­tures of films we’ve come to know. The bad guys get away with mur­der­ing the fam­ily and con­tinue on to a next unsus­pect­ing fam­ily. What’s the point of this? Well like No Coun­try for Old Men, the film is a the­sis on our mod­ern soci­ety and the idea that not every ends with hap­pi­ness, that there is vio­lence in the world and there’s a lot that peo­ple get away with. I think most peo­ple who go into this film with the under­stand­ing that this film is try­ing to say that ‘hey, why are you so inter­ested in see­ing glo­ri­fied vio­lence in film, it isn’t a good thing, and you shouldn’t be excited to see it, even from the safety of your couch’. One other small note about the film is that even though it seems like this film is vio­lent or intends to be vio­lent, all vio­lence is shown off-screen.