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Funny Games opens innocently enough with an overhead view of a car on the highway, boat in tow and opera streaming from the speakers on the radio. Ann (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth) and their young son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) are headed to their vacation home on Long Island. So far, so good! Like many car-bound folks, they’re playing road-trip games, but instead of hunting for license plates from Pennsylvania and Nebraska, they’re guessing who’s singing arias. We get it - they’re young, affluent professionals (once known derogatorily as “yuppies”). George guesses the vocals belong to Tebaldi, although I would have put money on Maria Callas. I too remember playing car games like that with my sons, only our level of sophistication ended at whether we were listening to The Beach Boys or Jan and Dean.

Next comes a riff from from Atalanta by Handel. Good guess, George! This guy knows his tenors from baritones. And then the music abruptly segues into auditory violence, a precursor of what’s to come. Just as the familiar “da-dum, da-dum, da-dum” refrain from Jaws alerts us to a transition, our ears are assaulted with trash metal music, compliments of John Zorn. Oh, oh, we’re in trouble now. If this was the Twilight Zone, I’d cue Rod Serling.

It starts off as a perfect day in paradise, or is it? As they approach the driveway of their vacation home, Ann and George spy neighbors standing in their garden accompanied by two young men. Chatting amicably from a distance, they make a date to play golf the next morning, but note that something is amiss. She can’t quite put her finger on it, but Ann senses something is not quite right. Dismissing her own uneasiness, she begins to make dinner, while her husband and son are busy readying their sailboat. Suddenly, the neighbors’ polite guest Peter (played with just the right amount of creepiness by Brady Corbet) materializes at the kitchen door seeking eggs for dinner. Decked out in all white, including gloves, the uber-polite young man looks out of place. It must be the gloves. Ann is leery about his sudden presence and inquires how he managed to get onto their property, since they have remote-controlled iron gates. “Through the hole in the fence,” Peter explains. What should have been a simple interaction, degenerates into brutality and unmitigated violence. Like Ann and George, from this point on, we are held captive.

Remade from his own 1997 film, Funny Games was written and directed by Michael Haneke (Caché, The Piano Teacher). The film is a shot-by-shot remake of the original, even using the blueprints from the original house set. The original did not reach American audiences basically because the actors were not familiar to us. In 2005, British producer Chris Coen approached Haneke with the idea to do a remake in English. He agreed under the condition that Naomi Watts star in the movie. And for the guys in the audience (and I imagine this would be a male saturated audience), they do get to see Watts tied-up, wriggling around in her underwear.

According to the press notes, Haneke began to explore his favorite subject, violence and the media, with the original film and revisits it here with the same eye. Haneke’s trilogy (The Seventh Continent -1989, Benny’s Video -1992, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance -1994, which exposes the consequences of the media’s portrayal of violence.  “I’m trying to find ways to show violence as it really is: it is not something that you can swallow. I want to show the reality of violence, the pain, the wounding of another human being.” He gets that right.

Much like a train wreck, we watch in horror as the family is forced to play “funny games” all the while being subjected to unimaginable terrors. Only, these are games they can’t win as the deck is stacked against them. And Haneke understands only too well the psyche of Hollywood-weaned audiences. He toys with us, knowing that we will always hold on to optimism, only to have our hopes dashed again and again. In 1988, a film from the Netherlands entitled The Vanishing (along with very similar cover-art) came to a brutal conclusion. The movie was remade in 1993 with American actors Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kiefer Sutherland. Only, the ending was strictly Hollywood. I admire Haneke for not caving in to make it more amenable for American audiences.

Recently, there seems to be a spate of successful gore-porn films like Hostel and Saw. According to Hollywoodreporter.com, Paris-based sales powerhouse Celluloid Dreams has launched a new specialty label, observing the surge in interest in the genre. Funny Games is cited in their initial lineup. So move over Carpenter, Craven and Romero, Haneke is here and you better hope he’s not playing games.

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