Funny Games (2008)

Michael Haneke's English-language remake of his own 1997 provocation arrives with the same furniture, the same golf clubs, and the same intentions. An affluent family, the Farbers, settle into their lake house for a holiday, and two polite young men in white shorts proceed to dismantle them. The cast is white, the setting is comfortable, and the film makes no remark upon either fact. This is a closed world of bourgeois leisure, and the director has no interest in who might live outside it.

The engine here is instruction. Paul rewinds the tape when Ann does something he dislikes, steps out of the story to scold her for breaking the rules, and smirks into the lens at the end as the cycle prepares to begin again. Haneke has said plainly that he wanted to make a violent and otherwise pointless movie as a message about violence in the media. The sermon is the point. The killers torment a wealthy family, which offers a faint jab at complacency, but the target is the audience, not the class system. Ann is resourceful, and Naomi Watts plays her with real grit, yet the film uses her suffering as a teaching aid.

Between the two young men there is a flicker of something intimate, a suggestion of coupled cruelty that the film never names and never develops. Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. No engagement with race, no environmental conscience, no interest in bodies as anything but sites of humiliation, no neurodivergence, no reworking of history. The rest amounts to a lecture delivered at volume, and the audience is expected to sit through it twice.