Funny Games

Michael Haneke's Funny Games opened in competition at Cannes 1997 and was widely received as one of the most controversial European films of its decade, a confrontation Haneke had explicitly designed and had spoken about beforehand. The film consolidated Haneke as the most uncompromising European auteur of the late 1990s; he would go on to The Piano Teacher, Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amour across the next two decades. Haneke remade the film, almost shot-for-shot, in English in 2007 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 they are taken hostage by two polite, white-gloved young men, Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering), who propose a sequence of what they describe as games. The film's central provocation is its sustained address to the audience, Paul, breaking the fourth wall and looking directly into camera, repeatedly negotiating with the viewer about the entertainment they are receiving.

Haneke's commitment to interrogating the conventions of home-invasion-thriller filmmaking (its inherited assumptions about violence, complicity and the viewer's pleasure) produced a film that has been continuously debated since release. The film operates as both straight horror-thriller and sustained critique of the audience's appetite for the genre. The closing minutes, with their direct provocation of the viewer's assumptions about narrative justice, are among the most-discussed sequences of 1990s European cinema.