Watch a clip from Funny Games

Michael Haneke’s 1997 German language version of Funny Games remains the only film I have watched that has given me recurring nightmares. Probably one of the most calculating and manipulative movies yet made, it combines a brilliantly chilling blend of the banal and the matter-of-fact with appalling stone-cold cruelty, all the time nudging the audience to remind them that, first, they are watching a film and, secondly, they are doing it voluntarily. Ultimately, Haneke argues, that makes us participants in the violence of the on-screen story. Haneke’s English-language remake of his own film has lost none of the queasily unsettling impact.

Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play the affluent middle-class couple Ann and George, who, with their son Georgie (Devon Gearhart), arrive at the start of the film at their lakeside weekend retreat. Watts and Roth give the kind of naked performances that drip tears, snot and misery. They’re a stark contrast with the arch, playful turns by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, excellent as the two immaculately turned-out young strangers who inveigle their way into the house and involve the family in a game played for the highest stakes imaginable.

The remake is meticulously faithful to the original, down to the architecture of the lakeside retreat that provides the setting for the “game” and the same impeccably laundered tennis whites and cotton gloves providing the socially acceptable face of evil. And once again the audience is as much the victim of this savage intellectual exercise as it is a guilty party.

With everything except the language and the cast the same, it would seem that the only thing that Haneke would change about his original film was that almost nobody saw it. Is that reason enough to go through the process of remaking the whole thing? I would argue that it is. In fact Funny Games is more relevant now than ever. With audiences increasingly inured to “torture porn” in horror films such as Hostel,surely now is the time to examine our complicity in the kind of entertainment that we are offered.

18, 111mins

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