by Brett Parker
Torture porn is at once one of the most profitable and most controversial film genres ever to grace the local box office. With films like Saw, Hostel, and Captivity, young audiences are lining up to watch cheap and stylized exploitation films in which people are brutally tortured for entertainment value. Youthful audiences are paying top dollar to see these films while critics are labeling them as the end of taste and decency as we know it. Now comes Funny Games, a film that some critics are branding as the worst torture flick of all while I feel it just might be the most brilliant and thoughtful of the whole bunch. Certainly the film is aware of its own brutality and forces the viewer to fully understand what exactly it is that they’re viewing.
The film is a shot-by-shot remake of the 1997 Austrian film of the same name by the same director, Michael Haneke. As the film opens, we see a married couple named George (Tim Roth) and Ann (Naomi Watts) taking their son George (Devon Gearheart) to a summer home by the lake. This family represents your typical white bred, upper-class American family. Shortly after arriving, a young man named Peter (Brady Corbet) knocks on their door and asks to borrow some eggs. Peter appears to be a clean-cut kid with perfect manners, so Ann happily agrees to help him out. After an awkward episode in which Peter keeps dropping eggs, another young man named Paul (Michael Pitt) shows up. Irritated by Peter’s clumsiness, Ann asks both of the boys to leave. They downright refuse and after George tries to intervene, Paul breaks his leg with a golf club.
It soon becomes clear what Paul and Peter’s true agenda is: they wish to keep the family captured and play torturous games with them. They drop subtle and horrifying hints that they will kill them one by one before sunrise the next day. Over the course of the evening, the deranged duo will suffocate, beat, strip, gag, and shoot at the family in a twisted psychological fashion. The family keeps demanding explanations for the pair’s behavior but they vaguely give durable answers. It becomes tragically clear that they are doing this for their own personal amusement. At one point, Ann asks “Why don’t you just kill us?” and Peter grinningly replies: “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment!”
Remember the scene in 1408 where Samuel L. Jackson practically begged John Cusack to stay out of a haunted hotel room? I feel like I received a similar warning from critics to stay away from Funny Games. The film has been getting whipped with half-a-star to one-star reviews on numerous occasions. Critics feel the audience faces more abuse than the tortured family in the film and a fellow colleague of mine snarled, “Who cares about the underlying meaning? There’s nothing entertaining about people getting tortured!”
I agree that the film is very disturbing and hard to get through. It’s an uncomfortable moviegoing experience, but it might also be an important one. Usually, I only get offended by an exploitation film when it is created in a cheap fashion that lacks skill or thought. Despite its shocking content, it’s hard to deny that there is skillful thought behind Funny Games. The film’s American genesis and self-reflexive nature make it obvious that Haneke is trying to make a serious statement about the torture porn “boom” in American culture. After viewing this film, you’ll realize there’s no turning back and it’d be too terrifying to move forward from here.
Consider the motivations for this remake. I have not seen the original Funny Games, but I have read in numerous articles that the updated film is a shot-by-shot remake of the original with hardly any changes, except for the actors and the language. Therefore, the original must be just as disturbing as its current incarnation. Why remake a sadistic foreign film for a mainstream American audience? Haneke probably sensed that the message of the film desperately needed to be heard amongst the current torture porn craze in
The key to unlocking the film’s themes are within the characters of Paul and Peter. Take a close look at them. Here are two clean-cut teenagers that are well-dressed with perfect manners. They are nihilistic and cold in the face of mindless violence and take amusement in watching strangers suffer. Could that perhaps be a way to describe the very target audience that turns up for torture porn? Notice the way they prefer hard metal music and snacking while observing their victims suffer. Notice how Paul is the only one who acknowledges the audience and even seems to relate to us. The similarities between these psychopaths and teenage moviegoers are not only accurate but frightening.
Like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Haneke uses his characters to force the audience to reflect upon themselves, bringing a depth to how torture porn is viewed that has been absent before.
I remember giving a negative review of Hostel, feeling that the film was too cheap and cheesy. I thought if a torture film had a more serious, solemn tone, it would make for a truly gripping horror film. Be careful what you wish for. Funny Games is exactly that and is one of the most white-knuckled and fearful moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had. It certainly isn’t for the faint of heart and only brave moviegoers will be able to fully endure it. The big question is whether or not a cruel entertainment like this one is necessary. I feel it is. Haneke has used his film to highlight a cancerous aspect of cinema and force the viewer to question the morality and flaws of its nature. It’s rare to see a film brilliantly pick apart a specific genre that could ultimately lead to its very undoing. Plus, it’s hard to see how the film’s message could’ve been conveyed without going to the belly of the beast. While I don’t condone the film’s content, I believe in the cause the filmmakers are fighting against and I hope future filmmakers and American audiences will get the true message.
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