When I say Funny Games is a
'bloody horrible' movie – I don’t mean in a 'directed by Jason
Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer' way.
I
say 'horrible' because it’s one of the most unsettling and disturbing
pieces of cinema I’ve sat through in some time (imagine it’s a
blackout, you go to the laundry looking for a torch, and look up to see
a goblin staring back at you through the window; it’s that chilling).
So 'horrible' in fact, that I near grabbed the wife’s asthma pump to
pump some air back into me after it finished.
Oliver Stone’s Natural
Born Killers
has a couple of moments in it that don’t go down well with a
newly-eaten beef taco, and Rich Linklater’s Anti-Maccas movie Fast Food Nation
evokes mass vomiting with its cow-slicing finale, but Funny Games?
It just straight-up rattles you.
For a film to be able to do that, it must be pretty darn good I say.
A shot-for-shot remake of his Austrian film of the same name, Michael
Haneke’s Funny
Games
centres on a peaceful family (Naomi Watts is Mom, Tim Roth is Dad,
Devon Gearhart is the 10-year-old son), holidaying at a lake house, who
find themselves held hostage by two freakishly-weird teenagers (all
dressed in white), played by Michael Pitt (in a role not too far
distanced from the one he played in the Sandra Bullock film Murder by Numbers)
and Brady Corbet.
The
boys don’t seem to have any motive, just a clear-cut plan to use and
abuse the clan. They’re also convinced that by 9am the next morning,
the family will be dead.
This is a piece of art. The direction
is amazing, the performances are top-notch, and the pot-boiling pace is
pitch-perfect. The film totally throws out the kidnapping-movie rule
book …. And to say any more than that, will ruin its biggest surprises.
The film will no doubt be ridiculed by some it is pretty much
just violent, for violent’s sake – it also goes against the grain of
essentially letting the kidnappers control the fort from begining to
end – and as I said, there are some pretty ghastly moments in the
movie, but if you can stomach a bit of raw sausage, you can stomach
this.
And just to remind us that we are watching a movie, the
fourth-wall is broken in a couple of scenes, so one of the kidnappers
can address the audience, asking what we would like to see. Further, if
even just to remind us that we’re not watching the "same old – same
old", the same character later stops (literally) a scene that has gone
wrong – one of the boys gets his comeuppance finally – grabs a TV
remote and rewinds the film back a few minutes so they can replay that
scene… and this time, do it his way.
A peculiar beast, but a brilliantly disconcerting one, Funny Games is
frighteningly first-rate.
4 out
of 5
Funny
Games (US Version) Australian release: 11th
September,
2008 Official
Site:Funny Games Cast: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth,
Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet Director: Michael Haneke
