An affluent Austrian couple, played by Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar, arrive with their son at their beautiful lakeside vacation home, eager for cookouts and boating excursions with their neighbors. Shortly after, they are visited by a two clean-cut young men who are dressed in white tennis clothes. These visitors, played by Arno Frisch and Frank Giering, make a seemingly innocuous entrance into the family’s home by introducing themselves as relatives of the residents next door and asking to borrow some eggs. When the guests increasingly impose on their hosts, the couple’s initial courtesy turns to wariness, soon followed by disbelief and terror. During the horrifying night that follows, the family is held hostage by their young intruders, who play sadistic games with them and make playful bets on whether their captives will still be alive by the next morning. As they sit, wounded, helpless, and humiliated, in their living room under the watchful eye of their tormentors, the family must rely on their resourcefulness to preserve their sanity and to save their own lives.
The 1997 Austrian psychological horror film,
Funny Games, which earned considerable controversy upon its release, has been described by its director, Michael Haneke (
The White Ribbon,
Amour), as an examination of the willingness of movie audiences to watch fictional characters suffer in cinema, and even as an indictment of our complicity as viewers while violence plays out on screens in front of us. After all, nobody goes to action films or horror films just to watch their protagonists have a happy and relaxing day at the park.
As the smiling villains in preppy tennis outfits victimize their three captives, they occasionally break the fourth wall by winking at or directly addressing the audience, as if to ask us if they should stop doing what they are doing or to seek our approval as the events unfold. Haneke, taking cues from other iconic ratings-savy filmmakers of the time, does not show actual graphic violence on the screen, instead preferring to give us a more intimate and chilling glimpse into the ordeal by showing close-ups of the family’s faces. During one brutal act committed offscreen by one of the young men in the next room, the camera shows the other one calmly making a sandwich in the kitchen. All the while, the home invaders refer to each other by made-up names (Peter/Paul, Tom/Jerry, Beavis/Butthead), almost as a constant reminder to us that we are just watching a movie.
I have revisited
Funny Games a couple of times over the past two decades, but I am still unsure how I feel about it. I prefer my horror films or home invasion thrillers to play it straight, and I prefer to have the ability to cheer for protagonists in the battle against an evil entity without receiving a self-aware acknowledgement from the key players. In the end, however, I do tip my hat to this film that, while skewering genre movies, still possesses some fantastic moments of genre suspense. The early scenes of escalating discomfort are perfectly executed, as is one scary sequence where the child escapes and is hiding in dark corners while one of the intruders purses him.
I believe that Alfred Hitchcock played a vastly superior complicity game with horror audiences in his 1960 film,
Psycho, when he subtly had them cheering for Norman Bates during a scene when Bates is disposing of a vehicle in a bog, but that is a minor grievance. Haneke holds his own admirably well.
In 2007, Haneke directed a shot-by-shot American remake of his own movie, with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts as the husband and wife leads. There’s something essentially riveting that has been lost in translation with the newer version, though, perhaps because fans of the director know what’s coming, and, perhaps more so because Mühe (
The Lives of Others) and Lothar (
The White Ribbon) are better able to convey the authentic nuances of the everyday-people couple than their English-language counterparts.
There’s some talk about DNR and waxy images on the transfer provided by this new
Criterion Blu-ray. Mayhaps so, but, in all honesty, I never would have given this a thought while watching the disc last night had I not read the posts in this forum beforehand. On my 4K television, the images look nicely detailed. The Caps-a-Holic site screencaps indicate more detailed images on an import edition when comparing close-ups of one-sixth of still frames, but I’ll happily stick to the
Criterion and let others choose as they will. Even the more discriminating fans should find that this Blu-ray is far from unwatchable. I’m going to fall in line with the reviewers who are giving positive accolades to the
Criterion.
The Micheal Haneke interview is a wonderfully insightful supplement. I also like the Arno Frisch interview, if for no other reason, it’s reassuring to see him as a cool and likable person.
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