Funny Games: 112 minutes. Rated: MA. Director: Michael Haneke. Starring: Naomi Watts, Michael Pitt, Tim Roth, Brady Corbet, Devon Gearhart
The opening sequence of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's first English-language film is ominously soothing. A wealthy family on vacation plays aural guessing games with the classical music lilting through the car stereo.
The melodiousness of their present existence is reinforced visually: an aerial shot reveals the road line markings and median strip as the five-line staff used for music transcript. They cruise the highway with gentle legato.
It's not so much the calm before the storm as a state of Zen before a nervous breakdown. Abruptly the sounds of demented death-metal blast across the film's soundtrack, coinciding with an interior shot of the smiling, cherubic family. They are en route to terror and chaos: we know it, even if they don't.
So from the outset, Funny Games, a shot-by-shot remake of Haneke's eponymous 1997 Austrian thriller, is executed masterfully. Portents continue to abound. A neighbour responds nervously when Anna (Watts) and George (Roth) slow down and greet him as they near their destination. Soon after, said neighbour visits them at their lakeside abode, and he's accompanied by a mysterious and eerily polite stranger (Pitt). The family dog barks uncontrollably.
Further innocuous moments assume an air of foreboding. Anna, on the phone to a friend, comments that her kitchen clock isn't working. Her young son Georgie (Gearhart), who's been helping his father launch their sailing boat down at the dock, comes to the kitchen in search of a sharp knife. By the time a second young stranger arrives at the house, ostensibly in search of eggs, the film is swathed in a sense of impending doom.
Funny Games is conventional, but self-reflexively so. It doesn't take a genius to work out that the two white-clad strangers, Paul (Pitt) and Peter (Corbet), have menace on their minds. Sure enough, before long George, Anna and Georgie find themselves besieged by these merciless, motiveless sadists.
During the ensuing hours they are emotionally and physically tortured by their assailants, ever conscious of Paul's promise that by morning, they will be dead. It's no relief that the vast majority of the violence in Haneke's film takes place out-of-frame. This is harrowing, bleak subject matter; a brutal assault upon a living, breathing, feeling portrait of the American Dream.
A post-modern flourish adds an academic distance to the