Michael Haneke
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Us (2019)
Directed by Jordan Peele
influenced by Funny Games (2008), Amour (2012)
Themes Visuals Plot
As in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), there is the sense that the Wilsons simply deserve to be destroyed, because all bourgeois families are in possession of riches and comfort that are not rightfully theirs.
The drive to their sun-and-fun home recalls similar rides in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games , although Peele adds dad-joke levity with the ’90s Luniz tune “I Got 5 On It.”
He mines the recent past to mock and challenge the present in a way that is already reminding me of Michael Haneke ( Funny Games , Cache , Amour) , but without the chilly sadism – and with far funkier soundtracks.
Lo que comienza como una variante fantástica de esas invasiones domésticas que tendrían al Funny Games (1997) de Michael Haneke como más ilustre exponente, pronto acaba derivando en una suerte de relato de ciencia ficción conspiratoria, deudor de aquellos que, protagonizados por entidades que suplantaban las identidades de los humanos (ya fuesen ultracuerpos o invasores de Marte), hicieron furor en la década de los 50.
The film’s next big set piece, the home invasion by the doppelgängers, is equally masterful, playing on the same fears of intrusion as “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), “The Evil Dead” (1981), “Scream” (1996), “Funny Games” (1997), “The Others” (2001), “The Strangers” (2008) and “The Purge” (2013).
For horror aficionados, the golf club used as a weapon might bring to mind Michael Haneke’s disturbing Funny Games, and a shot of black gloves may evoke a giallo predator.
Borgman (2013)
Directed by Alex van Warmerdam
influenced by Funny Games (2008)
Themes Visuals Characters Plot
It is, in short, a singular experience, a film that, while often lazily compared to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, eschews that director’s penchant for clinical dissection in favor of a playfully nefarious tone.
Production designer Geert Paredis has found a brilliant location for the sinister events that unfold, its seclusion in verdant surroundings reinforcing a vague kinship with Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
A dark suburban fairytale that takes cues from Yorgos Lanthimos ("Dogtooth") and Michael Haneke ("Funny Games"), while firmly remaining its own strange beast, "Borgman" hovers perilously over a stiff upper-class family whose bearings are unmoored by the appearance of a mysterious vagrant fellow (Jan Bijvoet).
While easily comparable to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," the characters in that movie were more blatantly psychopathic, while the motives of Borgman and his crew are difficult to discern until the very end.
Soon enough, things start to feel more like Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” a very different kettle of incongruity, in which thugs invade an affluent couple’s home.
What does make “Borgman” a first cousin to “Funny Games” is the victim’s membership in the European one percent, which in the U.S. would make them just another upper middle-class family in suburbia.
In its way, “The Father” is as emotionally rigorous as “Amour,” Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning film about aging in all its inevitable harshness.
The best film about the wages of aging since Amour eight years ago…
…movies like Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated Amour, a devastatingly bleak film about dementia…
There have been many films that have dealt with dementia from “Away From Her” to “Amour” to “Still Alice,” but we’ve never seen a movie handle the subject quite like “The Father.”
Add The Father to the list of profoundly moving films about dementia/Alzheimer’s: Away from Her, Amour and Still Alice.
…yet while watching his decline is sad, it’s never searing the way it was with the superior French film Amour.
Elements of the script are certainly familiar; Michael Haneke's psychological thriller "Cache" is one possible reference point, and there's a sinister final plot development that goes all the way back to Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (as well as Bruce Norris' play "Purple Heart").
The sins of the high-school cafeteria come home to roost in “The Gift,” a coolly unsettling thriller that begins as an unironic homage to late-’80s/early-’90s yuppies-in-peril dramas like “Fatal Attraction” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” before taking a turn toward the moral and existential minefield of Michael Haneke’s “Cache.”
He fills the spaces between the shock points with interesting, stirring topics — from cutthroat competition in the corporate sphere, to how little we know about those closest to us, to, as in “Cache,” the arrogance of the privileged.
No es que El regalo se inspire explícitamente las películas de Park Chan-wook y Jaume Balagueró (tampoco el director parece haberlas citado en ningún momento como referentes), pero la superposición de ambas propuestas nos lleva a un terreno muy cercano a los temas que trata el film que nos ocupa: de OldBoy , El regalo recogería la idea del pasado como una ola funesta que descarga contra el presente de un personaje (en ese sentido, otra posible ancla sería el Caché de Michael Haneke).
Goodnight Mommy (2015)
Directed by Severin Fiala
influenced by Funny Games (2008), The White Ribbon (2009)
Themes Visuals Characters
It’s not recommended for nervous types — the psychological and visceral brutality here may put you in mind of another Austrian director, the unblinking Michael Haneke , particularly his “Funny Games.”
Suffice it to say, the pic’s reality is not our own — more akin to fellow Austrian Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” where psychology offers limited insights into human behavior and the body-horror moments feel nerve-twistingly raw.
Written and directed by first-timers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala with a stylistic nod to the sick Funny Games by fellow Austrian Michael Haneke, the movie is a mad, malevolent adventure through the minds of its three characters and the house they inhabit.
But the boys themselves display a certain coolness that suggests they’re far from innocent: Franz and Fiala shoot them like a cross between the two girls from The Shining and the two young psychos from fellow Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
Not since Michael Haneke unleashed a pair of psychotic young sadists on an unsuspecting family in his original 1997 Funny Games has a summer getaway in the peaceful Austrian countryside seemed less like a vacation.
Una de las fuentes de inspiración que tuvieron los directores Severin Fiala y Verónica Franz -quienes además dirigen aquí su primer largometraje- es sin dudas Funny Games, aquella fantástica cinta hecha por su compatriota Michael Haneke.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
influenced by Funny Games (2008), Caché (2005)
Themes Visuals
It's also the kind of casually brutal film that brings to mind Euro assaults like Michael Haneke's "Funny Games."
Aparece el dilema aterrador con el que el director austriaco solía deleitarse, sobre todo en la época de “Funny Games” (1997), donde estableció un nuevo y perverso modelo para agitar las emociones de la audiencia.
That said, it’s hardly your conventional horror movie, and people aren’t exactly running out to identify with sadistic no-win hypothetical scenarios (there’s a reason hardly anyone went to see Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” when he remade it in the States).
Lars von Trier (“Breaking the Waves”), Michael Haneke (“Funny Games”), and Ulrich Seidl (“Import Export”) are clearly Lanthamos’s idols, but he doesn’t possess the intellectual or practical rigor of those established filmmakers.
The cool detachment of Lanthimos’ approach owes a great deal to Kubrick, and to the Michael Haneke of “Caché” and “Funny Games.”
He’s manipulating us, conning us into accepting something terrible, much like Michael Haneke did when he made his slasher flick send-up Funny Games—and then made Funny Games again, in English.
2008’s remake is a nearly shot-for-shot effort, not unlike Gus Van Sant’s misunderstood “Psycho” rant from 1998.
In 2005, Gus Van Sant told an interviewer about his shot-for-shot 1998 remake of "Psycho," "You can't copy a film.
The new film, which had its United States premiere on Wednesday night at Sundance, is not quite a shot-by-shot, line-by-line facsimile, in the manner of Gus Van Sant's "Psycho."
"Funny Games" doesn't seduce you with conventional storytelling and character development and then turn them around on you -- like, say, Alfred Hitchcock's " Rear Window " and "Psycho."
This isn’t like Hitchcock having another crack at “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” as he did after an interval of twenty-two years, and conjuring a very different result; it isn’t even like Gus Van Sant reheating “Psycho” in color, as he did in 1998; it’s like Hitchcock himself shooting “Psycho” all over again, in 1970, somewhere off an Autobahn outside Graz.
No matter how much the ad campaign promises "come see the torture!" this was ever only going to be a film for the art house crowd; I certainly don't know, but I expect most of the people who have seen the new film also saw the original at some point, and are motivated by curiosity, not unlike Gus Van Sant's Psycho from 1998 (a film that's really a terrible analogue for Haneke's remake, the more you think about it).
As a media-dominated (or decimated, take your pick) society, we've rocketed way past A Face in the Crowd, beyond Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, and into some creepy, white-hot, prechopped, overshot, stage-managed hyperversion of world and national events.
They're towing a sailboat behind them so that, presumably, we can be reminded of Polanski's "Knife in the Water" (a psycho terrorizes a married couple aboard their yacht; it also inspired the Australian oceangoing thriller "Dead Calm").
The Purge (2013)
Directed by James DeMonaco
influenced by Funny Games (2008), Funny Games (1997)
Characters Plot Themes
Their leader—played by Rhys Wakefield, channeling Michael Pitt in Funny Games —offers Hawke a deal: If the family hands over Hodge, the Purgers will leave them alone; if they don’t, they’ll have no choice but to break into the house and kill everyone inside.
What follows is a mix of Sam Peckinpah's classic "Straw Dogs" and Michael Haneke's two "Funny Games" films, as the mild-mannered Sandins must make difficult choices and tap into their inner animals.
The tension is well sustained and the film is an effective, predictable cross between Assault on Precinct 13 (the remake of which DeMonaco scripted) and Funny Games (the fair-haired preppy leader of the sinister besiegers is a dead ringer for one of the psychopathic kids in Michael Haneke's film).
And then, the plot finally decides to begin: the gang hunting the wounded man arrives at the Sandin house, and the very articulate young man leading them (Tony Oller, who I don't suppose was cast entirely because of his uncanny resemblance to Brady Corbet, of the American Funny Games , though it surely didn't hurt) informs the family that if they don't turn out the refuge, all the security systems in the world won't stop hell from raining down on them.
But by far the worst performances, however, come from Wakefield, who should have recognized that what he’s doing was already satirized by Michael Haneke in “Funny Games,” and by Arija Barekis as a suspiciously solicitous neighbor.
Like Michael Haneke with Funny Games, DeMonaco (Staten Island) seems adamant about making sure people experience and interpret his movie the correct way, taking in the full symbolic heft of his thoughts on economic disparity, and not getting too much visceral enjoyment out of the action.
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Funny Games (2008), Funny Games (1997)
Themes Visuals
It has many antecedents, from the mocking cool sadism of A Clockwork Orange to the pressure-cooker intensity of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs to the house-party torture games of Roman Polanski's 1966 classic, Cul-de-Sac.
Etching in the character, Pitt borrows a little from A Clockwork Orange, just as Haneke borrows a little from Kubrick's signature amalgam of fire and ice.
His white gloves are strikingly odd (the entire pure white getup and Nazi youth haircut immediately calls "A Clockwork Orange" to mind), yet go unmentioned (far later a more direct neighbor, Betsy (Siobhan Fallon Hogan, "Holes," "Dogville"), who pulls up at dock will ask Paul if he is cold).
Essentially, Funny Games plunders the nastiest bits from Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, and I Spit On Your Grave and fashions them into a film that eschews context and any sense of closure in favor of a metacinematic style that, apparently, seeks to identify the audience with the psychopaths.
John’s (Charlie Shotwell) shaggy haircut, white polo shirt and disaffected speech immediately recalls the tennis white-clad psychopaths of Haneke’s Funny Games .
It isn’t only John who has a mind for mischief, with Sisto and writer Nicolás Giacobone push the limits of their premise to the extreme, often filming at an icy remove, bringing the film firmly into the realm of the sociopathic “boys will be boys” genre that Michael Haneke and Yorgos Lanthimos have dabbled in with “Funny Games” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” respectively, and introducing a meta-commentary into the film with a mother-daughter story told in parallel that veers into the absurd.
Coming Home in the Dark (2021)
Directed by James Ashcroft
influenced by Funny Games (2008)
Themes Plot Characters
It recalls the ominous Lake Berryessa murder scene in David Fincher's Zodiac and has all the unbearable energy of Michael Haneke's Funny Games .
The pointedness of the film’s aims means it trades out the unnerving ambiguity of its undeniable cinematic forerunner—Michael Haneke’s Funny Games—for a more straightforward pulpy didacticism, making the subsequent desensitizing effects of the violence an unintended outcome rather than the entire point.
Adapting Owen Marshall's short story of the same name, first-time feature director James Ashcroft appears to be taking cues from Austria to begin with, however, and fashioning Coming Home in the Dark after Michael Haneke's two versions of Funny Games.
One such offering, Coming Home in the Dark, is a deeply unsettling bit of Ozploitation (although it’s actually from New Zealand, so Kiwiploitation?) that begins like a distaff version of Haneke’s own Funny Games by way of Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek.
In Haneke’s Funny Games , Peter and Paul were free-ranging sadists, playing with holidaymakers ostensibly to pass the time.
Today's media-saturated "reality" is inching, for the average American, alarmingly close to what Canadian filmmaker/provocateur David Cronenberg predicted with 1983's Videodrome (not to mention 1999's eXistenZ) and which Haneke echoed, from a pre-EU perspective, via Funny Games.
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Directed by Drew Goddard
influenced by Funny Games (2008)
Visuals Themes
From its hilarious opening sequence (complete with a reference to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," another film that dealt with the question of why audiences enjoy violent entertainments so much) to its genuinely breathtaking final image, "The Cabin in the Woods" is a keeper that will send viewers out into the streets afterwards in the throes of a cinematic contact high and the urge to tell friends who haven't yet seen it that they need to see it right that second.
The Cabin is, as you'd expect, crammed to the rafters with genre references, among them The Shining, The Evil Dead, Cube, Hellraiser, The Blair Witch Project, the 1950s EC horror comics, Japanese horror (there's a delirious running gag about weird happenings in Kyoto), H P Lovecraft, even Michael Haneke's high-minded chiller-as-treatise Funny Games.
If only the technology existed to turn the movie screen into a reflective surface - now *that* would have worked, like Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" played for actual comedy.
Because, you see, The Cabin in the Woods is the closest anyone’s ever likely to get to a lighthearted stoner version of Michael Haneke’s grueling movie about violence and voyeurism, Funny Games.
But rather than structure Romy’s descent into lusty madness as a force of utter Freudian annihilation (as with Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher,” clearly a reference here, as is Steven Shainberg’s 2003 law office kinkfest “Secretary”), Kidman and Reijn make Romy’s transformation a joyously destructive one instead.
Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
Directed by Sean Durkin
influenced by Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), Caché (2005), Funny Games (2008)
Themes Visuals
They sure are scary, especially given the remote setting, reminiscent of that in Michael Haneke's diabolical Funny Games.
Durkin has clearly studied some masters of the subjective eye - Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion) and Haneke (Cache, Code Unknown).
Durkin has clearly studied some masters of the subjective eye - Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion) and Haneke (Cache, Code Unknown).
They sure are scary, especially given the remote setting, reminiscent of that in Michael Haneke's diabolical Funny Games.
The next morning, the young woman slips out of the farmhouse and into the woods, soon followed by others, but she makes it into town and, despite being found by Watts (Brady Corbet, 2007's "Funny Games," "Melancholia"), gets up the nerve to make a phone call to her sister.
The Witch (2016)
Directed by Robert Eggers
influenced by The White Ribbon (2009), Caché (2005)
Themes Visuals
But in peering ahead to the Salem trials, “The Witch” also faintly echoes Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” another drama in which the forces of patriarchal repression and the cruel realities of agrarian life will exact a devastating future toll: We’re watching not just a private tragedy but a prequel to a larger-scale catastrophe, sowing seeds of suspicion, violence and fanatical thinking that will be passed down for generations to come.
This is essentially an art film comparable, in terms of its approach and impact, to Michael Haneke’s similarly elusive “The White Ribbon,” and suggesting otherwise is almost a recipe for disaster.
My own experience with the horror genre is not as broad as some -- absent professional obligation I tend to avoid them -- but I'd suggest that the feel of The Witch isn't too far removed from that of the Michael Haneke movies, Cache (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009).
It wouldn’t be surprising if Mr. Eggers was also familiar with “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke’s 2009 film about God and patriarchy, authority and domination in Germany before World War I.
We could throw in other contenders as well, like Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” or the ‘70s British horror classic “The Wicker Man” or even Lars von Trier’s profoundly disturbed “Antichrist.”
My own experience with the horror genre is not as broad as some -- absent professional obligation I tend to avoid them -- but I'd suggest that the feel of The Witch isn't too far removed from that of the Michael Haneke movies, Cache (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009).
As a media-dominated (or decimated, take your pick) society, we've rocketed way past A Face in the Crowd, beyond Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, and into some creepy, white-hot, prechopped, overshot, stage-managed hyperversion of world and national events.
Dogtooth (2009)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
influenced by Funny Games (1997), Time of the Wolf (2003), The Seventh Continent (1989), Funny Games (2008)
Themes
Probably an evolved form of the style and judgment usual dished out by Michael Haneke (who I do like, despite both Funny Games).
The film’s provocative conceit and the cold-blooded precision of its violence recall Michael Haneke, particularly Funny Games and Time Of The Wolf, but Lanthimos has a prankish sense of humor, and favors an offhand absurdity that aligns him closer to Luis Buñuel.
The film’s provocative conceit and the cold-blooded precision of its violence recall Michael Haneke, particularly Funny Games and Time Of The Wolf, but Lanthimos has a prankish sense of humor, and favors an offhand absurdity that aligns him closer to Luis Buñuel.
The film’s provocative conceit and the cold-blooded precision of its violence recall Michael Haneke, particularly Funny Games and Time Of The Wolf, but Lanthimos has a prankish sense of humor, and favors an offhand absurdity that aligns him closer to Luis Buñuel.
Dogtooth is at its most sublimely absurd when the parents are interpreting phenomena like passing airplanes or Frank Sinatra's recording of "Come Fly with Me"; it's at its best when it hovers between the trauma of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò and the creepiness of Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent.