It is time for another funny game. Instead of concentrating upon violence itself, however, the film focuses on the suffering of the victims by showing the agony in their faces in long close-ups. In this manner, Haneke tries to eliminate the sales factor which is always inherent in any representation of violence. Simultaneously, Haneke presents the massacre of an entire family in a highly playful manner, which deliberately undermines all existing concepts of Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil. The result is a highly striking inversion of the famous Cartesian turning point to I kill, therefore I am.
Causality rests entirely in itself.
At the same time, the youngsters constantly chat and use logical deductions and moral argumentation in order to make up for the apparent lack of reason. They construct a guilt in the name of which the victims have to be tortured more and more. They also engage in bets. Basically these are bets on the killers omnipotence. The final increase to the victims agony comes when the strangers ask the mother to send a child s prayer to her personal God so that she can choose her own mode of dying freely.