Funny Games

Plot synopsis:
George and Ann Farber, their son Georgie, and their dog arrive at their lake house. Their next-door neighbour, Fred, is seen with two young men, Peter and Paul, who seem to be friends or relatives. They find Fred reacting somewhat awkwardly. Fred and Paul come over to help put the boat into the lake. Lucky, the dog, keeps barking at Paul, but George ignores it. After Fred and Paul leave, George and Georgie stay outside by the lake, tending to their boat. Georgie asks his father why Fred was behaving so strangely.
While Ann is in the kitchen cooking, Peter comes by to borrow some eggs. Ann gives him the eggs but Peter drops them. Feeling a little annoyed, Ann gives him another four eggs and Peter takes off. Soon afterwards she hears Lucky barking and Peter and Paul show up together. They seem friendly, and they admire a golf club belonging to George. Paul asks her to try out one of the clubs outside and she approves. In the boat, George and Georgie hear Lucky is barking hysterically when suddenly the barking stops.
Peter and Paul request more eggs, because the last ones also ended up broken, Ann becomes frustrated, but when George tries to force the men to leave, Peter breaks George's leg with the golf club. The two young men then take the family hostage.
Ann tries to call for help on a cell phone, but finds it unusable because Peter had dropped it in the sink. Paul then guides Ann on a hunt to find the family's dog, which he has killed with George's golf club. When neighbors visit, Ann passes the two men off as friends.
The family is forced to participate in a number of sadistic games in order to stay alive. Paul asks if George or Ann wants to bet that they will be alive by 9:00 in the morning, and says that he and Peter are betting they won't be. Between playing their games, the two men keep up a constant patter. Paul frequently ridicules Peter's weight and lack of intelligence. He describes a number of contradicting stories of Peter's past, although no definitive explanation is ever presented as to the men's origins or motives.
During the "games" Peter and Paul put Georgie in a bag, nearly suffocating him; to stop this George is forced to request Ann uncover her breast to Peter and Paul. When released from the bag, Georgie tries to escape. He attempts to climb a locked gate but changes his mind and goes to the neighbors' empty house. There he discovers that they have been killed.
At the same time Paul goes out searching for Georgie after having Ann's hands tied behind her back and ankles also tied with tapes, with Peter left to guard her and George. Ann asks Peter why he does not kill them directly, and Peter replies that they should not forget the fun of games. Ann attempts to be freed by George in an absence of Peter but fails to make it before his return and is beaten again. Ann begs him to let them go, but Peter refuses. When found, Georgie attempts to shoot Paul with a shotgun, but the gun fails to go off. Paul returns him to the living room, along with the shotgun.
The men play a new game, saying whoever gets counted out will be shot. Georgie panics and makes a run for his life which results in Peter shooting and killing him. Paul is a little annoyed that Peter didn't follow the rules of their game to the letter.
George and Ann are grief-stricken, but they eventually resolve to survive. Ann is able to free herself and flee the house while George, with a broken leg, desperately tries to make a call on the malfunctioning phone. Ann struggles to find help, only to be re-captured by Peter and Paul, who return her to the house. After stabbing George, they attempt to force Ann to make a choice for her husband, between a painful, prolonged death with the knife or a quick death with the shotgun.
Ann seizes the shotgun on the table in front of her and kills Peter. An enraged Paul grabs the shotgun and starts looking for the television remote. Upon finding it, he literally rewinds the last occurrences back to a moment before Ann grabs the shotgun, thereby breaking the fourth wall. On the "do over", Paul snatches the shotgun away and admonishes her, saying she isn't allowed to break the rules.
Peter and Paul then kill George and they take Ann, bound and gagged, out onto the family's boat. Around eight o'clock in the morning, they nonchalantly throw her into the water to drown, thus winning their bet. They knock at the house of the neighbors who had previously visited the family. They request some eggs, thereby restarting their cycle of murder.

Tags: violence, dark, murder, sadist

Review:
I've never seen such great acting in a German language movie (the film is Austrian - just to be precise); the script is full of surprises and the whole film has a tightness that is very rare; every little detail is in the right place.Michael Haneke always likes to challenge his audience, but even among his more controversial films 'Funny Games' stands out.
Perhaps it refers to the funny games built on standard film violence in everyday movies.
Going through the comments index, I see the expected responses: it was boring: it was pointless: it was too long: it's a satire: the games aren't actually that funny: it involved the audience in a neato way: it's nothing new: it's been done before.
While watching this movie last night, I thought of another reference, this time from "King Lear": "Like flies to wanton schoolboys are we to the gods;/ They kill us for their sport." What this movie does is challenge the audience's own involvement in visual narrative -- usually, we watch movies from somewhere on-high and omniscient; we're invisible but we see all; we're voyeurs, just like God. In Haneke's film, we identify not with the victims but with the all-powerful killers as they set about their funny games.
This is not how violence is in the real world, violence is a horrible fact of life, not a glamourous thing for youths to copy, and I think Haneke intended Funny Games to show it how it really is.
You don't want to watch it, but at the same time, you feel hypnotised by it.I will not detail any events of the film, to save spoiling the atmosphere, but I will note one thing that people tend to be confused about:- "Why did the family let them into the house in the first place?" The two characters of Peter and Paul are let to walk all over the family because of one flaw in the bourgios psyche - 'The more polite a person is, the better a person they are.' This absurd way of thinking is played on by Peter and Paul and they obviously score, plus 'getting into the house without breaking in' is also one of their 'games'.For those who haven't seen the film, I definitely wouldn't recommend this for a night in with the parents/girlfriend, but I definitely would for people who want to see the difference between death and Tarantino-glam.
I think there is a valid argument to make that the universal visceral impact that Funny Games has on audiences undermines the very thesis of its director Michael Haneke.
You could argue that Haneke had to resort to making such an extreme film to have the intended impact on an audience dulled by years of cinematic violence.
Watching "Funny Games" (1997) directed by Michael Haneke for the first time was an unforgettable visceral experience.
It's been several years since I saw the film but it still makes me shiver just to think about it."Funny Games" can be first mistaken for yet another conventional thriller where the good guys always win in the end and the evil is punished.
No, "they are among us", they are nice and polite, well read, shy and ironic, they have the names from the new Testament, Paul and Peter, they talk with the soft refined voices but they are monsters nevertheless who have no regard for a human life and who want to play their sadistic funny games to the extreme."Funny Games" is a controversial film and I've read many reviews and comments that call it "a failure", accusing the film and its creator of not having said anything new or original on the connected subjects of violence, the media, and voyeuristic audience.
Indeed, the fact that the entire story takes place in pretty much one place would suggest it might struggle to capture the viewer's attention, certainly for its duration.However, the simple combination of the mechanics of the performances, the script and the general tension make this story work outstandingly well; indeed, its isolated feel simply adds to the overall claustrophobia.Peter and Paul are two apparently genial young men, who show up at the isolated boathouse of Anna and Georg, a mature couple with a child, who are all taking a couple of weeks holiday.When Peter seems to be making a nuisance of himself, Anna starts to lose her patience with him.
Paul then arrives on the scene and before long it has converted from an underbelly of irritation to outright intimidation, followed by crude violence.It is extremely hard to sum this movie up without making it sound like a highly unoriginal piece of cinema, but there can be no question it is anything but.The script is simply incredible; the overtone of terror slowly creeps up on the viewer, and on Anna and Georg, with more than a dose of psychological manipulation.
Almost by pretending they are doing nothing wrong, with more than a hint of cordiality along the way, the two perpetrators manage to inflict a disturbing level of fear upon the family, and yet it is the most subtle form of assault.Rather than constant threats, the two act like dinner guests who just happen to be terrifying the heck out of their hosts.When things go further, and violence joins in, it takes the trauma to a new level, as it is gritty horror rather than a splatterfest.
As opposed to Oliver Stone's speculative box office hit NATURAL BORN KILLERS, that actually made us laugh and thus destroyed the whole threat of violence, Michael Haneke's FUNNY GAMES turns the art of cinema into a loaded gun.
And thus Haneke's point that "violence is bad" is made terribly clear.Not an easy task, but Haneke pulled it off like there was no tomorrow, and for that he deserves our praise in a time when violence is synonymous with entertainment.See FUNNY GAMES - if you dare!.
By having one of the psychos address the camera a few times, saying things to the effect that they have to give the viewers their money's worth, Haneke is essentially wagging his finger at anyone who has ever enjoyed the portrayal of violence in a film.
But there's a flaw in Haneke's logic: the only time we consume torture and protracted murder as entertainment is in recondite European art films like I STAND ALONE, MAN BITES DOG, and FUNNY GAMES.This is the kind of picture that gets bluenose types all huffy, and prone to pronouncements on the order of, "This is the most repellent movie ever made!" I'll stay off that high horse--but I will say, a few hours after seeing the picture, that there is something singularly loathsome in the hypocrisy of Haneke's coating a suspenseless piece of fictional snuff porn in the sanctimony of its being a Statement on Violence and Media.
And you know what side the filmmakers are on when one of the sadists terrifies a little kid by slipping on a CD in a neighbor's house the kid has escaped to, and the music is that well-known favorite of middle-aged bourgeois people on vacation...John Zorn and the Naked City.This kind of Extreme Cinema has worked much better when practiced by artists in totally disreputable sub-pulp forms--like Lucio Fulci and Ruggero Deodato, whose sometimes almost unwatchable films engage in a spiritual wrestling match between the desire to go to the limits, and the conscience that watches over the mayhem.
At every level, Funny Games likes to set up what it sees as high culture versus low culture in general (classical versus rock being just one instance) then says that all this low culture is junk culture and tied in with all this excessive violence that the film wants us to question in the cinema.
Yet these same people were content to watch the didactic sadism of Funny Games, knowing that it's directed by an intellectual Austrian and will pat them on the back in the end and reinforce their viewpoint, which is that horror/violence in cinema is trash.
This seemed to me like a remarkable high-handed attitude for a film director to take, as if the inability to watch his film was somehow proof of the viewer having a more beautiful soul than that of somebody who can sit through the whole thing without dropping their popcorn.I realised fairly quickly that 'Funny Games' is not a movie in the conventional sense of being a filmed dramatic fiction designed to give the viewer a satisfying aesthetic experience.
It's some sort of art gesture, designed to make Michael Haneke feel like he's doing something special, something higher than other film-makers.I don't like Quentin Tarantino's films not because they are very violent, but because I find them boring; I don't like all the trashy B-movies that Tarantino is in thrall to, so I don't appreciate it when he cannibalises their plots and motifs for his own stuff instead of writing about real people.
'Funny Games' is nothing more than a humourless art-house version of a Tarantino movie, in which the smirking protagonists systematically terrorise a family and wink at the camera throughout, asking us if we want to keep watching.
By the end, I was astonished by writer-director Michael Haneke's audacity in telling a macabre home-invasion story devoid of Hollywood glamour, humor, and mercyremake or no, it's still one of the ballsiest exercises in visceral, reality-based horror ever released by a major studio.So, when I decided to give the original "Funny Games" a spin (mere days after my viewing of American version), I was filled with presupposition toward how much I would appreciate the original (with the twists of Haneke's shot-for-shot remake still mapped out in my mind)similar to a sadistic "bet" our captors make with their prey, I was wondering if this earlier, German-language version would survive on its own terms.
Unlike the much-derided American remakes of "The Vanishing" and "Les Diaboliques," Haneke sees no need to let either culture off the hook, especially when each has its own prominent history of violence, on- and off-camera.Ironically, the references to metalhead couch potatoes Beavis and Butt-Head probably seemed like an incendiary bitch-slap to the passive glamorization of American filmed violence in the 1997 version, but there is an even stronger sense of irony when the MTV-hosted duo are referenced in the remakeon the shores that birthed them, and the cult following of Generation Y-ers that has accumulated in the years since the show's cancellation (a sure sign that our passivity, if anything, is more pronounced now).
It is truly stunning how Haneke mines the same static framing and intense performances to ends that are equally effective in both films (even knowing the outcome of a protracted long take following a pivotal off-screen event, I found the experience just as emotionally agonizing to witness).While it may seem hypocritical to "side" with Haneke (at least in the context his film creates), especially when I patronize (and am prone to enjoying) films that frequently downplay the reality of human suffering, the effect in both versions of "Funny Games" is undeniably powerfulthese are difficult, ugly, and emotionally draining films crafted with undeniable (and remarkably subtle) purpose.
When her husband and her son arrive from the lake, Georg is hit on his knee by Paul with a golf club and the family is imprisoned by the strangers that start to play a sick and sadistic deadly game along the night with the defenseless family."Funny Game" is the movie that made Michael Haneke worldwide known and certainly is ahead of time and a masterpiece of sadism, alienation and cruelty.
They take the family hostage in their cabin and all of them are physically and mentally submitted to coercion , torture , punches , kicks and many others things .Violent as well as disturbing film about two psychotic young men take a mother , father, and son hostage in their vacation cabin and the family is forced to participate in a number of sadistic games in order to stay alive .
Director Michael Haneke has said that he never intended 'Funny Games' to be a horror film ; instead his idea was to make a film with a moralistic comment about the influence of media violence on society , it's a subject that Haneke is quite passionate about.
Like the films Funny Games lampoons, the opening is an invitation, hits a few very obvious buttons preparing the audience, gearing us up, winding...
But get this: making this movie is an act of sadism directed at an audience no more deserving of its suffering than the victims in the film itself.
Yeah,I see the point of the director who tried to create the most frightening,chilling atmosphere ever made.But the film totally lacks of any plot,being only mindless violence.Beside,acting is terrible throughout the whole movie,and it only deepens the sense of boredom.One of the worst film ever seen:1,and I feel kind enough not to spend other bad words..
"Sherlock Jr." (1924) shatters more boundaries between film and audience than a boatload of Hanekes.On the positive side, the direction, acting, and cinematography in "Funny Games" are quite good, but only as far as the script allows.
Sure, you'll watch it just to see how it ends, but please don't tell me that this movie depicts deep philosophical questions about media or morality any more than a video game does.As for terror, Haneke has just taken a lesson from Hitchcock or Lynch (Blue Velvet) who have shown that it often works best in seemingly nice circumstances when it is unexpected and therefore unsettling.And as for the character winking at us, I think that is just because the joke is on us for having watched.
However, reputation and moral outrage does not, a good film make -- and the over-hyped shock of reactionary audiences could not be more present than in the backlash/acclaim dished-out to Haneke's psychological thriller/cum social conscience -- 'Funny Games'.
To those who trash the film on grounds of violence and pretension, I think you're watching the wrong kind of movie.
Haneke has said he didn't want to make a film which exploited the hypocrisy of a sensation-hungry audience by wallowing in the kind of on-screen brutality which caused him to make FUNNY GAMES in the first place.
When *that* scene comes around (believe me, you'll know it when you see it), you'll probably begin to understand how she feels.As much as you may be insulted by Haneke's point of view - his film is an antidote to the sanitised, beautifully choreographed violence of Hollywood movies and the audiences who lap them up - he's certainly got a point.
Anyone who has ever seen a Michael Haneke film will know he can provide a near to perfect, yet challenging piece of cinema and Funny Games is perhaps just a close to perfection like any of the other films which he made that I have seen.
He made this film where two sadistic young men capture and torture an upper-middle class family because he wanted to make the audience aware of the fact that we enjoy this types of cruel movies.
Funny Games is an expertly crafted insult to the audience for liking a genre of movies the director does not.
I am not saying that film should be brutally violent, but it should aspire to the level of genius in Michael Haneke's Funny Games..
While I watched it I thought about every cliché seen in horror Thrillers of this type, and how this film approached them on purpose, to destroy them and give them an unexpected twist, playing with the expectations and making the audience laugh nervously whenever the fourth wall was broke or the opportunities for the protagonists to get aired out of the situation were crushed.
I've seen a lot of brutal and disturbing stuff for example "Cannibal Holocaust","Day of the Woman","Last House on the Left","Guinea Pig:Devil's Experiment","Man Behind the Sun","Forced Entry" etc.,and this film is also pretty harsh and unsettling,but rather in non-violent way.Most of the sadistic violence occurs off-screen,and the ending is very bleak and depressing.The acting is extremely believable,the photography is excellent,the characters are well-developed and two white-gloved sadists are pure evil.Austrian director Michael Haneke,responsible for earlier equally disturbing and powerful "Benny's Video",manages to create a horrific atmosphere of dread and fear.No gore or bloody violence,just good sheer terror!This is the way horror should be!!!So if you're into extreme cinema this one is a must-see!.
Whoever finds this shocking story of torture and murder that can happen to anyone, even a perfectly normal family (of bad actors) to be any funny have got to be sick (I've read some of the reviews) Funny Games is not funny...it's a dull, tedious film with stupid characters you just want to slap in the face (that's not just the bad guys!).
So i do not recommend this film to anyone but indie buffs who understands a filmmaker's goal (even if its a disturbing one) to explain what this movie is about (or maybe this director is one sick puppy.) As for the trickery thrown at us, that's the director's way of playing funny games on us....get it?.
The remote trick pulls back the satisfaction of revenge and the ending makes it clear that the fear not only hasn't gone away but instead must be relived again and again!Arno Frisch [the skinny bad guy] can be viewed as the director who periodically peers at us thru the camera, smirks and reminds us that we are watching a movie, and reveals to us the funny games that he and other directors play on us at our insistence..
I want the two hours of my life back.]  I'm still in shock over "Funny Games." How could Haneke have made these two films?
The film appears to want to analyse the relationship between the audience and a movie, and it does this by way of having the lead characters ask the audience questions (like "You are on their side, aren't you?"), and this does somewhat work...just not all that well.Basically, Funny Games is a thriller that overstepped it's mark.