Funny Games

"Funny Games" (1997, 2007)

The film so not-nice that writer-director Michael Haneke made it twice, "Funny Games" begins as two tennis-white wearing, polite young men come to the vacation home of a mom-dad-son unit asking if they can borrow some eggs. But the eggs break, and ... more the two young men ask more insistently for more, and the family, and we, slowly realize that the two young men are wearing surgical gloves and that their bland, polite smiles mask psychotic intent. But Haneke doesn't just deliver a great example of the home-invasion psycho thriller. He delivers a film that's actually a critique of the home-invasion psycho-thriller, one that questions us about why we watch as urgently as the two youths question their captives. One of the most richly-divisive films of the past decade, in both its original version and English-language remake, "Funny Games" shows a polite upper-class home turned into a torture chamber, and makes us ask why we'd ever want to watch such a transformation unfold.

('Funny Games'/Warner Independent Pictures)