The poster for Michael Haneke's memorably tense Funny Games (Warner Independent, March 14), an English language remake of his 1997 French film of the same name, is a striking, effective thing, I think mostly because we rarely see such rubbed-raw emotion captured in one-sheet form.



Starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, Funny Games is a brutal and provocative thriller in which a vacationing married couple and their son get an unexpected visit from a pair of deeply disturbed young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet). Rough, nasty times ensue. More thoughts will soon follow, but the movie is basically a fascinating, elongated exercise in de-masculinization.

There are plenty of ways to convey this, of course, but the above one-sheet gets at the off-kilter, uncomfortable artfulness of the picture. The simple, small text of the poster's sole half-proffered explication of its story ("You must admit, you brought this on yourself," a line uttered chillingly by one of the psychopathic home invaders) catches one's attention only because of the centering of the text. What we mostly get — via Watts' disheveled hair, tear-stained "ugly cry" face, and tightly framed, flush-to-bottom visage — is a sense of the teased anxiety the movie has at its core.