Not ha-ha funny

Funny Games
DVD
M'House
2/11/08

About ten years ago we brought John Waters to JMU. At dinner (because this is how I choose to remember it) someone asked him if he'd seen anything good lately and he mentioned Michael Haneke's Funny Games, saying "It's really disturbing." Sounds good. But, I figured that if John Waters found it disturbing, it had to be really fucked up.

So it took ten years to get around to watching it.

It's an unsettling movie, about an upper class German couple and their son who go to their lake house for a holiday. Two young psychos show up and proceed to torture and torment them. That's it. But that's not it.

Basically it's a comment on the conventions of horror movies and the people who watch them. There's a gimmick here, where one of the two psychos is not only fully aware of the conventions of horror movies, he's also fully aware that he's actually in a movie. For me, it worked. It's also interesting that Funny Games seems to be a critique of movies like Hostel and Saw, but it predates them by years. It's also better that them.

I don't know if it's because I waited for ten years to watch it that I didn't find it as disturbing as I expected to. It is unsettling and creepy and most of the actual violence is kept off screen, which of course makes it worse. There's a technique used throughout where the camera will focus on a single view and all of the characters are off screen. You hear things, and you want to see them, but you know that it's something that you really don't want to be looking at. It's perverse and often baffling, but it works.

Still, I'd recommend that anyone interested in horror movies see it. I'm curious to see the remake with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, but honestly am not sure why it was made, since it appears to be shot-for-shot the same. But, it got me to finally watch the original, so that's a good thing.