Funny Games (1997)
(On Cable TV, June 2019) There are a few films whose reputation not only precede them, but tell you everything you need to know about them. So it is that Funny Games is widely remembered as the home invasion horror film that plays unfairly with its audiences, intentionally toying with expectations in order to leave them with no way out. The infamous remote-control scene is as extreme a piece of meta-cinema as it’s possible to imagine outside a satirical comedy. I would argue that knowing as much as possible about the film’s ending is not a bad thing, because writer-director Michael Haneke (who remade his own film in English for an American studio in 2007, changing almost nothing) is determined here to make a statement about film violence and audiences’ desire for revenge. And that he does. Over nearly two hours spent circling the same idea, often not even bothering to move or turn off the camera. It gets very, very, very long. I think that some of what he has to say here is clever—but brevity is the essence of wit, and Funny Games is far too long to remain interesting when everything points to an ending that is then executed without many surprises. I’ll forgive nearly everything in the service of a happy ending, but not in the service of an everybody-dies one. It doesn’t help that I’m not really a fan of vengeance cinema—Haneke seems intent to score points with another kind of audience. Still, by the end, I was not only hating the over-the-top psychopaths serving as Haneke’s puppets, but the entire cast and crew of the film for going forward with such an indulgent and pointless piece of cinema.