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.… Read the rest
