Funny Games

Written and Directed by Michael Haneke

Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet and Devon Gearhart.

Review by Junior.

Funny Games starts with an artful overhead shot of a happy, affluent family driving to a their vacation home by a lake, over the strains of opera music, setting a cool, clean tone which is maintained throughout this carefully crafty, intense thriller. Things start going badly for our yuppy heroes (played by Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, who also was Executive Producer) and their young son.

Their happy vacation is invaded by Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), who insinuate themselves into the couple's home in a seemingly innocuous way, soon to reveal themselves to be serial sociopaths. Their home invasion is creepily polite and conversational, even while they are threatening, controlling and hurting the family.

The film masterfully maintains its cool, even tone, making the situation that much more threatening. The camera is often static, with characters wandering in and out of frame. This seems to be a stylistic choice at first, but is later revealed to have a more substantive reason behind it. The camera rarely catches any violence on-screen, in direct contradiction to recent gorefests such as Hostel, except for one or two notable exceptions.

Similar in premise, but miles away in tone from films such as The Last House on the Left, Funny Games overtly acknowledges its thriller tradition and what the audience expects of it. It both acknowledges, fulfills and consciously subverts the audience's expectations of such a film. As the movie goes on, the clues to the deconstructivist tendencies of the director become impossible to ignore, and may interfere with some viewer's enjoyment of what is otherwise a tight, visceral thriller which sticks in the memory long after it is over.

Not recognizing the director's name, and given the postmodern bent to the film, I assumed the film heralded a new talent I would be wanting to watch. After consulting IMDB, I found that I was totally wrong. The director's intelligence and artistry are due to the fact that he has foreign sensibilities, being German. Director Michael Haneke has been directing films in Austria and Germany for over 30 years. In fact, Funny Games is an English-language remake of his own 1997 version.

I highly recommend Funny Games for those of you who can both stomach a disturbing thriller and also enjoy talking about a film afterwards. There's more to chew on here than just what happens to this unfortunate family.

Story---7.5
Acting---7
Look---9
Overall---8