Horrorfest 2016: Funny Games (1997)

Here's another one I've been putting off: 1997's FUNNY GAMES, an Austrian film from director Michael Haneke. He remade the same film in 2007 in English, but I decided to watch the original. I've steered clear of it all these years because I knew enough about it to know that it's a home invasion movie that displays violence against an innocent family while also trying to critique "these types" of movies and their audiences. So, I already didn't really want to see innocents tortured, and therefore didn't really need a movie critiquing me for daring to watch it.

But then I watched it anyway.

The funny thing is, it works better as a home invasion movie than a critique of violent movies or audiences of violent movies. It's hard for me to articulate this but long story short, I feel like a movie's actual content is a more powerful critique of itself or its audience than any comment on that content could ever be. This is tricky because the movie comments on itself, which is the whole premise of the movie, but the moments when it breaks the 4^th wall are redundant, as far as I'm concerned, because the movie is already a well made testament of the horrors of violence.

So, when the killers wink at me as if to say, "See? This is what you wanted, audience," I can only say back, "What? A well made movie? Of course. So what?" If the movie sucked, that would be a different story.

I've said so much but I've said so little. Kinda like this movie.

FUNNY GAMES is about a wealthy family (Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Muhe and Stefan Calpczynski) whose vacation at their lakeside holiday home is interrupted almost as soon as they arrive by 2 young men (Arno Frisch and Frank Giering) who show up to borrow eggs and then won't go away. A minor passive aggressive annoyance snowballs into out and out violence, and the titular "funny" games begin.

The horrifying thing about this movie is how arbitrary and passionless the killers are. The notion of arbitrary violence that comes out of nowhere is more frightening to me, personally, than violence motivated by some kind of personal reasoning. Haneke is a brilliant filmmaker, and he's good at making movies that seem to exist outside of any heavy handed point of view, but of course that is a trick, and we know he is showing us exactly what he wants us to see. This movie, more than his others, plays with its own medium to draw attention to the fact that we as an audience are watching pretend atrocities, but that almost works to the movie's detriment.

After all, they don't stop halfway through APOCALYPSE NOW and say, "Man, war is bad." You just kind of get the picture.

The only way for Haneke to REALLY make his point would be to REALLY make a movie that ONLY exists to celebrate violence. But then, he'd be deplorable instead of an artist. So, I'll just be satisfied with FUNNY GAMES.