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Funny Games
(1997)

Director – Michael Haneke – 1997 – Austria – Cert.18 – 103m

*****

Two young men turn up at a family’s holiday home to humiliate and torture them via a series of controlling exchanges (or games) – plays in Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Saturday, June 21st

Review originally published in Shivers around the time of the film’s 1997 London Film Festival premiere

With Hollywood currently rediscovering the profitability of slick, fun horror movies in the blockbusting wake of Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), Europe proves itself well capable of delivering work at the other end of the spectrum. Funny Games is the latest brainchild of Austrian-born Michael Haneke (Benny’s Video, 1992).

Like Scream, Funny Games never misses a trick on the technical level. Unlike Scream, its intention is not a non-stop, mass-consumption, vicarious thrill-laden roller coaster ride (which Funny Games certainly isn’t) but a rigorous and unrelenting, one way descent into madness, fear and despair depicting violence, mutilation, torture and – above all – amoral manipulation of one’s fellow human beings – as truly horrific.

To dismiss Funny Games as either moral lecture or morality play would do it great disservice. Never afraid to plumb the most violent depths of human depravity to make its points, it sidesteps the usual blinkered, narrow‑minded arguments about both the portrayal of violence in the media and its place in modern life.

The film’s capacity to horrify is immense, its plot deceptively simple. The nuclear family comprising father Georg (Ulrich Muhe, who also played the father in Benny’s Video), mother Anna (Haneke regular Susanne Lothar), young son Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski) and their dog arrive at their lakeside holiday home.

Two young men turn up – the shyly taciturn Peter (Frank Giering) and the well-spoken and polite Paul (Arno Frisch), who sometimes refer to each other as those epitomes of cartoon violence Tom and Jerry (series of shorts, 1940-1967, created by William Hanna, Joseph Barbara) – and by means of a series of controlling exchanges (or games) proceed to humiliate and torture the family. Games include: the seemingly innocuous “I want to borrow four eggs” (the opening gambit), “kitten in the bag” (a sack is tied over Georgie’s head to prevent his watching while Anna is forced to undress) and the self-explanatory “hide and seek”.

While this sounds like a standard variation on numerous psycho thrillers, what marks it out as different is Haneke’s approach – calculated less to thrill than to horrify. Indeed, the film is less a thriller than (to invent a word where nothing else seems adequate) a horrifier – an entity distinct from the horror thriller where events portrayed are served up for pleasurable audience consumption, since those in Funny Games prove, on the contrary, genuinely upsetting.

One of the means used to achieve this is the way the proceedings are anchored in an immediately familiar, everyday normality – but with elements that are familiar not from the movies but from real life. For instance, the scene where Anna chops vegetables in the holiday kitchen seems to go on for ever, but no more so than this activity does in real life. Nothing thrilling about such mundane activity either.

But by the time you’ve sat through that you feel so grounded in naturalistic observation that, any violent act portrayed is leant a convincing edge of reality it wouldn’t otherwise possess. Events here seem truly violent and shocking – unlike all those movies where the audience hardly blinks as another act of violence occurs.

To reinforce the disturbing feel, the family members are allowed few opportunities for retaliatory acts of violence against their tormentors. At one point, the film seems to shift into the language of the Hollywood gore actioner as mother Anna grabs tormentor Paul’s shotgun to bloodily blast Peter away. The audience relief is palpable as everyone relaxes. Then, in a moment that mightn’t be out of place in Woody Allen or Jean-Luc Godard, Paul picks up the TV remote, presses scan/rewind, and runs the image back to before his fellow torturer was blown away. Tell me it’s only a movie.

Further mental games, perhaps stranger still, come into play as one watches, digests and attempts to write about this extraordinary movie. As with Scream, one hesitates to give away plot twists that might spoil it for the first time viewer. But while Scream‘s role as entertainment is clear-cut, Funny Games‘ more horrific portrayal of violence carries a greater ambiguity: how far are we supposed to be repulsed by it, and how far get off on it?

The piece is structured so that, as in a horror thriller, our sympathies lie with the victims (the family) and yet, in the end, perhaps the piece is as much if not more about the two perpetrators of torture (the two men). Is Haneke himself playing funny games with the viewer? In the end, his is a bleak vision and Funny Games potentially the year’s most controversial film, even if it’s unlikely to appeal to Scream‘s fun blockbuster mentality.

Haneke himself directed the US remake Funny Games (2007).

Review originally published in Shivers around the time of the film’s 1997 London Film Festival premiere.

Funny Games plays in Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective from Saturday, June 21st.

Retrospective Trailer:

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