In 1997, Radiohead famously, if quietly, described the process of producing their album OK Computer as an act of deconstruction and defiance — necessarily destroying the more comfortable parameters of radio-friendly rock ‘n’ roll, and the distinction afforded them by the success of their previous album, The Bends, in order to “save themselves.”

For 66-year-old French writer-director Michael Haneke, film is a similar medium of confrontational statement more than corporate-vetted entertainment. Many of his movies are, in whole or part, sociocultural critiques foremost — labyrinthine morality tales, goosing psychological inquiries and jabs to the solar plexus that just happen to unfold on celluloid.



A painstaking recreation of his own 1997 film, Haneke’s Funny Games, starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, is at once buttoned-up and brutal, a provocative drama of domestic kidnap and torture in which an idyllic holiday turns nightmarish for a well-off married couple. Ann (Watts) and George (Roth) arrive at their vacation home with their young son (Devon Gearheart) in tow, and notice that their neighbors are acting strangely. They soon find out why when they’re visited by a faux-simpleton (Brady Corbet, above right) and his friend/possible brother (Michael Pitt, above center), who are dressed in preppy tennis-whites and alternately address one another by names actual and fictional (e.g., Peter, Paul, Tom, Tubby). A feigned dust-up, over dropped eggs and perceived discourteousness, gives way to a stand-off, with the boys’ sing-song politeness belying their true psychopathic nature.

Spiked with a few dark streaks of morbid humor, Funny Games is chiefly powered by lingering menace, both out of frame (that the family dog is going to meet a bad end is a queasy certainty, especially when one character borrows a golf club to try out) and especially on screen (most notably in an excructiatingly long take in which a bound, beaten Watts eventually tries to wriggle free from her awful predicament). Just don’t call it a psychological “thriller.”

Haneke likes aerial and topographical framing, which early on gives the movie the cool, detached sheen of a high-end linens catalogue, with its discrete shots of unviolated domesticity (shoes, a staircase, the refrigerator and the like). As the nasty chess game between captors and captives unfolds, though, the film becomes a series of isolated single- and two-shots.

There are any number of examples of siege films that Funny Games recalls, from Straw Dogs and Bruce Willis’ Hostage to a throwaway thriller like Unlawful Entry and, believe it or not, 1994’s underrated The Ref — all if mostly in formal antecedent rather than execution. Yet to try to comparatively experience or air-quote enjoy the film on this level is to miss Haneke’s point. To him, the story itself here is almost incidental. The story serves as an elongated exercise in demasculinization — George is forced to watch as his child is imperiled, his wife forced to strip, etcetera — and a case could be made that the movie is partly about the folly of denying an animalistic side to humanity. But Funny Games is mostly about the consumption of violence for entertainment’s sake, its commodification, and how in turn this warps our expectations of it, and relationship with it in the real world.

Haneke addresses this by breaking down the fourth wall in a few moments, not in a radical, Ferris Bueller-type of way, but rather with an unnerving, offhand line or two from our psychopathic ringmasters (“You’re on their side, aren’t you?”). For Haneke, violence is undeniably a virus, as it moves here quite literally from one house to another. Without any of the normal sort of shock, gore or jump-scares lurking in the camera movements, though, a new type of grim uneasiness develops: that of the nasty and brutish reality of violence as it exists off the edges of the screen. Funny Games posits that we are a persuadable lot, humanity — willing to accept almost anything in the name of entertainment.

That the movie is being sold in furtive, mock-thriller clips set to the “William Tell Overture” (a classical tune popularized as the theme of The Lone Ranger) only reinforces and highlights the irony on display here. A button-pushing, master-class example of manipulation, the designed-to-divide Funny Games is a fascinating indictment of what a lot of film has become. It feeds on audience discomfort, and even, to a certain level, distaste. That it’s getting a theatrical release at all, let alone from a major studio (albeit via its boutique label), is a strange thing indeed. (Warner Independent, R, 108 minutes)