Funny Games (2007)
Funny Games
NETFLIX Summary: Anna (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) are enjoying a vacation with their son when a marry of sadistic young men, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), breaks into their shack and holds the family hostage. The psychotic duo plays twisted games with their prisoners, forcing them to concur to stay alive. Director Michael Haneke remakes his chilling 1997 German-vernacular film as an indictment of the media’s pull with violence.
SPOILERS!!
REVIEW: The inscription has multiple meanings, referring conspicuously to the games two young criminals play w/their captives during the sure of the story, but there’s a more sly, subversive credentials to the games writer/director Michael Haneke plays w/the thriller brand, and even more significantly, the games he plays w/the audience and our expectations.
The screen starts w/a nasty little fair game as the opening credits are rolled with catlike tread in a kind of “arthouse” proprieties of simple text on a black spotlight, then the film proper opens w/calming classical music on the soundtrack that lulls us (as the kinsfolk themselves are playing a guessing-game among themselves while traveling in their car), then in the twinkling of an eye a jarringly loud, discordant, weighty-metal song is blasting away as the credits proceed with to roll more in the style of a traditional B-flick picture show cheapie thriller. This opening sets the richness and gives us a clue as to what’s to give up.
The plot of FG is deceptively simple: Two unsophisticated psychopaths take a family of three - mother, daddy, son - hostage in their vacation home and proceed to physically and psychologically torture them, culminating in the consequent murder of all three. And it certainly works on that most primary level. But the film isn’t extraordinarily a mere thriller, it’s about the thriller style itself, it’s about the perverse nature of ruinous entertainment, and Haneke plays w/the conventions of the type and film throughout. He follows the rules of the fashion and then turns around at certain points and breaks all those rules; indeed, he violates the very conventions of skin itself.
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