Funny Games (1997)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Two psychotic young men take a mother, father, and son hostage in their vacation cabin and force them to play sadistic "games" with one another for their own amusement.
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8 films that influenced Funny Games
What critics say influenced Funny Games
Later films, such as Last House and John Carpenter's Halloween, would give theorists plenty more to ponder, such as whether the audience's interest in a horror film is necessarily sadistic.
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.
As in Haneke's earlier "Benny's Video" and (less directly) "The Seventh Continent," the target here is not only contemporary materialism and self-satisfaction, but also modern media--symbolized by a mobile phone that refuses to function dependably, and brought directly into the narrative by a few surprising moments (and one that's downright astonishing) when a character manipulates the action (and us in the audience) as a self-aware part of the fiction.
Writer-director Michael Haneke (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) communicates this thesis very clearly, mostly through one of the two killers, Paul (who refers to himself and the other k iller as Paul and Peter, or Tom and Jerry, or Beavis and Butt-head).
Haneke's first feature, The Seventh Continent (1989), brilliantly chronicles the hideous fall of another affluent family, rendering the savage effects of modern techno-alienation through a frigid style befitting such masterpieces as Godard's Weekend, Bresson's L'Argent, and Haynes's Safe.
Suffice it to say Haneke succeeds on that count--which, in the post-Natural Born Killers era, is no small feat.
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If it's really a metacinematic treatise on the audience's complicity in sadistic entertainment that you're looking for, well, let me refer you to the Belgian shocker Man Bites Dog, which covered this ground more rigorously a few years ago.
Anna escapes temporarily only to unwittingly flag down her former captors while searching for help, and Paul literally rewinds the film after an unexpected change of events; these and other twists are meant to be profound but they’re nothing more than gags from the latest Scream (or, better yet, Scary Movie ) given the elitist treatment.
If the movie were programmed at multiplexes, would viewers react any differently than they might to the Scream movies?
Truth be told, I think the Scream movies are a more valuable addition to the genre.
As in Haneke's earlier "Benny's Video" and (less directly) "The Seventh Continent," the target here is not only contemporary materialism and self-satisfaction, but also modern media--symbolized by a mobile phone that refuses to function dependably, and brought directly into the narrative by a few surprising moments (and one that's downright astonishing) when a character manipulates the action (and us in the audience) as a self-aware part of the fiction.
Writer-director Michael Haneke (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) communicates this thesis very clearly, mostly through one of the two killers, Paul (who refers to himself and the other k iller as Paul and Peter, or Tom and Jerry, or Beavis and Butt-head).
Alas, Haneke's aesthetic already begins to seem bullying in his follow-up, the notorious film-fest shocker Benny's Video (1992), in which the 14-year-old latchkey kid of the title, numbed by countless hours of TV violence, murders a casual acquaintance without remorse, literally leaving his well-off parents to clean up the mess.
A sort of Austrian art-house Cape Fear by way of the new Cinema of Cruelty, Funny Games follows an upper-middle-class couple ( Susanne Lothar , Ulrich Muhe ) and their young son ( Stefan Clapczynski ) to a lakeshore retreat where they're systematically taunted and tortured by a pair of clean-cut young lads ( Arno Frisch , Frank Giering ) wearing white tennis shorts and prim white gloves.