Funny Games (2007)When faced with a predator, an animals instinctive reaction is to freeze up, roll over and expose your belly, to hope that you will not be it's prey. Predators thrive on exploiting this response, and this allows them to remain predators. Funny Games (2007) is a remake by Michael Haneke of his own Austrian film of the same name and plot nearly a decade later. It is the story of a home invasion perpetrated against the Farber family--Ann (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth), and George Jr. (Devon Gearhart)--by two young men who call themselves "Paul" (Michael Pitt) and "Peter" (Brady Corbet).
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Funny Games is a psychological horror film, not only in the menacing presence of Paul and Peter and the cruel tortures they inflict on the Farbers, but in how the film consciously circumvents our expectations and actively denies us the conventions of the genre. Funny Games is a self-aware film, declaring as much in many scenes. Paul occasionally breaks the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly or looking right into the camera. The effect is that the "film" acknowledges its existence and our complicit involvement with the events as entertainment by virtue of watching it, expecting certain beats and results by conditioning. Therefore, Paul and Peter are essentially the "emcees" of our "fun", for whatever cathartic experience we have been trained to expect from watching shocking displays of violence and seeking a rationale behind it. At one point, Peter tells Paul a story he heard about two different planes of existence, which is a commentary on the film itself and the "reality" of a world in a movie. The emotions which a movie is designed to stir come from empathy, a sense of placing ourselves in the shoes of the protagonists. But horror movies like this also historically come with a "safety net"; some trauma is expected, like the family dog being killed by the sadistic invaders, or even some humiliation like tying up the family with duct tape. And it is the threat of something more dire which becomes the great motivator for the protagonists to overcome their challenges. The hero must emerge triumphant in the end for the ordeal to have any meaning...right? Funny Games sets the stage for this kind of film early on, and for those familiar with the style of the film, the first beats are predictable by design. The Farbers come up to the country with their boat, and joke with their other rich neighbors about a golf game. Some kind of tension is affecting them, but only George Jr.--and the audience--seems to pick up on it. When Paul and Peter show up unexpectedly on their property, the Irish Setter with the unfortunate name of "Lucky", barking defensively at them, and again the audience is clued into something amiss about the well-mannered psychopaths. These kinds of moments would be at home in the first act of any horror film, but what Funny Games is really doing is playing to the "ground rules" of the genre, ones which the film aims to prove are mere illusions, fantasies, and constructs to give us the illusion of security. Similarly, in another horror movie, the idea of a psychotic pair of miscreants proposing playing a "game" to excuse their sadistic tendencies would be merely cliche; in Funny Games, it defines the nature of the film itself. By working within the confines of the rules of the genre from the start, then subverting them, the film is actively violating us and our expectations, creating a true sympathetic reaction with the Farbers beyond the narrative.
What kinds of expectations does Funny Games provoke and subvert? Well, the Farbers are clearly a well-off family, upper-class...they play guessing games about classical music on the car ride up to their summer house, and are "forced to eat steak" because the freezer defrosted. This is a way to tease us into being a little less sympathetic to this "type" of people...yuppies, in other words. Can you as easily empathize with the affluent? When Peter (sometimes Tom) comes by to ostensibly borrows some eggs, his feigned clumsiness elicits exasperated impatience in Ann. According to the conventions of the genre, this response by Ann would mean that some kind of "retribution" is certainly warranted--something to "teach her a lesson" for being rude (and rich). Even the outfits worn by Paul and Peter are preppie, New England uniforms, and their commentary on George's golf clubs is kind of yacht club small talk one would expect from Ivy League trust fund babies. But even this disguise is like camouflage used by a predator; one can see through it easily if one looks closely. The boys have pasty complexions and ingratiating feigned manners. They wear their overly formal white gloves, which suggest not only pomposity but also an unsettling intent to avoid leaving behind fingerprints. The outfits themselves are evocative of those costumes worn by Alex and his "droogs" in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, which also featured a devastating home invasion sequence. In fact, after the debut of A Clockwork Orange, newspapers reported "copycat" home invasion crimes, young men emulating the activities from the movie. Even the suggestion of Paul and Peter's horrible exploits being a mimicry of media violence has been an assessment others have made of Funny Games. There is even one such moment where Peter holds one of George's Calloway clubs in a phallic way, suggesting a stimulation coming from their brutal domination of the Farbers. Funny Games also shares stylistic motifs with the work of Roman Polanski, another master of paranoid suspense films. The boat which George and his son set up, and the psychological mind games played between the characters recalls Knife in the Water; there is even a literal knife which ends up on the skiff, intimated to play a crucial role later. Funny Games wisely avoids the trappings of pseudo-psychological horror which sometimes degenerates into "torture porn", or grisly violence solely to provoke the audience. There are protracted, even painful shots of the aftermath of these two abject lunatics' savagery, showing the reality of the horror they have wrought, in moments which fully rip the rug out from under us...scenes which are jaw-dropping and bone chilling in how they upend our expectations. Exterior shots of the lush and stately homes of these well-off families are presented as placid and serene, but belie the horrors inflicted by Paul and Peter. The boys insist that there are "rules" to their game, but these rules are never defined. Even more so, it becomes clear that the rules are one-sided, and that in truth, there are no rules at all, merely the presentation of structure to keep us (as it is with the Farbers) complacent and still, as the predators sink their teeth into our throats.
Recommended for: Fans of an unsettling suspense film which thrives on twisting your expectations. Funny Games is a continuous slow boil of escalating tension and terror, filling you with a chemical response of unease and discomfort, openly and subconsciously.
What kinds of expectations does Funny Games provoke and subvert? Well, the Farbers are clearly a well-off family, upper-class...they play guessing games about classical music on the car ride up to their summer house, and are "forced to eat steak" because the freezer defrosted. This is a way to tease us into being a little less sympathetic to this "type" of people...yuppies, in other words. Can you as easily empathize with the affluent? When Peter (sometimes Tom) comes by to ostensibly borrows some eggs, his feigned clumsiness elicits exasperated impatience in Ann. According to the conventions of the genre, this response by Ann would mean that some kind of "retribution" is certainly warranted--something to "teach her a lesson" for being rude (and rich). Even the outfits worn by Paul and Peter are preppie, New England uniforms, and their commentary on George's golf clubs is kind of yacht club small talk one would expect from Ivy League trust fund babies. But even this disguise is like camouflage used by a predator; one can see through it easily if one looks closely. The boys have pasty complexions and ingratiating feigned manners. They wear their overly formal white gloves, which suggest not only pomposity but also an unsettling intent to avoid leaving behind fingerprints. The outfits themselves are evocative of those costumes worn by Alex and his "droogs" in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, which also featured a devastating home invasion sequence. In fact, after the debut of A Clockwork Orange, newspapers reported "copycat" home invasion crimes, young men emulating the activities from the movie. Even the suggestion of Paul and Peter's horrible exploits being a mimicry of media violence has been an assessment others have made of Funny Games. There is even one such moment where Peter holds one of George's Calloway clubs in a phallic way, suggesting a stimulation coming from their brutal domination of the Farbers. Funny Games also shares stylistic motifs with the work of Roman Polanski, another master of paranoid suspense films. The boat which George and his son set up, and the psychological mind games played between the characters recalls Knife in the Water; there is even a literal knife which ends up on the skiff, intimated to play a crucial role later. Funny Games wisely avoids the trappings of pseudo-psychological horror which sometimes degenerates into "torture porn", or grisly violence solely to provoke the audience. There are protracted, even painful shots of the aftermath of these two abject lunatics' savagery, showing the reality of the horror they have wrought, in moments which fully rip the rug out from under us...scenes which are jaw-dropping and bone chilling in how they upend our expectations. Exterior shots of the lush and stately homes of these well-off families are presented as placid and serene, but belie the horrors inflicted by Paul and Peter. The boys insist that there are "rules" to their game, but these rules are never defined. Even more so, it becomes clear that the rules are one-sided, and that in truth, there are no rules at all, merely the presentation of structure to keep us (as it is with the Farbers) complacent and still, as the predators sink their teeth into our throats.
Recommended for: Fans of an unsettling suspense film which thrives on twisting your expectations. Funny Games is a continuous slow boil of escalating tension and terror, filling you with a chemical response of unease and discomfort, openly and subconsciously.