Funny Games

Michael Haneke's Funny Games premiered in competition at Cannes 1997 and was among the most controversial European films of its decade, a confrontation Haneke had designed on purpose and talked about in advance. It confirmed him as the most uncompromising European auteur of the late 1990s; The Piano Teacher, Caché, The White Ribbon and Amour followed over the next two decades. In 2007 he remade it, almost shot for shot, in English with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.

An Austrian middle-class family, Anna (Susanne Lothar), Georg (Ulrich Mühe) and their young son Schorschi, arrive at their lakeside holiday house. Within hours two polite young men in white gloves, Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering), have taken them hostage and begun proposing what they call games. The real provocation is the film's direct address to the audience: Paul breaks the fourth wall, looks straight into the camera and keeps negotiating with the viewer about the entertainment on offer.

Haneke set out to interrogate the home-invasion thriller and its inherited assumptions about violence, complicity and the viewer's pleasure, and the film has been argued over ever since it opened. It works as a straight horror-thriller and as an attack on the audience's appetite for one. Those direct provocations of the viewer's expectations about narrative justice are why it is still among the most discussed European films of the 1990s.