The correct response is: Relax, dear lady. Director Michael Haneke abhors mindless cinematic violence as much as you do. He just has a different approach: high-minded shock therapy. With "Funny Games," the filmmaker hopes to attach electrodes to a jaded, thrill-seeking American audience and jolt us out of our bloodlust.
He tried it once before, but it didn't take. The original "Funny Games," made by Haneke in 1997, was a cult sensation in Austria and on the international festival circuit. Wherever it appeared, the film exuded a miasma of dread and left critical punch-ups in its wake. But the director always intended "Games" as a critique of Hollywood violence and our own complacent voyeurism, and so he was holding the mirror up to the wrong audience. With the success of 2005's "Cache (Hidden)," he finally had his entry to America.
Thus this new "Funny Games," a shot-for-shot English-language remake of the original with a few name stars to sucker us into the dark. Naomi Watts (who also executive produced) plays the wife, Ann; Tim Roth, the husband, George; Devon Gearhart is their young son. Arriving at their lake house, they see a pair of young strangers talking with their neighbors, and soon those strangers have invited themselves in.
They are named Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet) - or perhaps it's Tom and Jerry, or Beavis and Butthead. They wear tennis whites and cotton gloves, and they're unfailingly polite even as they're wielding a golf club or loading a shotgun. They have no motive. "Why are you doing this?" asks George. "Why not?" replies Peter.
The games of the title refer to the sadistic mind trips these two play upon their victims over the course of one very long night, but they also extend to the movie and anyone watching it. Each time Paul turns to gaze at us through the camera lens, or wonders who the audience would like to see survive - or, in a key scene, fiddles with the temporal flow of the movie itself - "Funny Games" explicitly asks us: Do you want to play this? Are you sure?
