2) Funny Games (2007)
Michael Haneke is one of the most notoriously difficult filmmakers in the history of the medium. Discontent with how film is produced and digested by audiences across the world, he has sought to create movies that are deliberately problematic, whilst never quite stretching into the nonsensical dizziness of the avant-garde where nothing is supposed to make sense.
Some of Haneke’s tricky works have been a great watch in the way they’ve manipulated the audience. The likes of Cache made intelligent, veiled references that held ambiguous meanings and sent the audience scampering and scouring for clues to determine why the film played out the way it did. His 1997 film, Funny Games, was a little more sinister, however. It featured a plot that showed a man frequently breaking the fourth wall and asking the audience whether they’ve “had enough yet” whilst he and his friend torture a bourgeois family. It’s basically the director telling his audience how sick they are for watching stuff like this.
Apparently, Haneke was so eager to tell us how repulsive we all are that he made the movie twice. The 2007 version of Funny Games is a shot-by-shot carbon copy of his Austrian equivalent from 1997. It’s exactly the same expose of human blood-thirst, but written in another language and enveloped by a shiny new cover: a glossy facsimile with Hollywood stars at its helm.
Why bother? Apparently, Haneke’s admonition of cinematic voyeurism apparently didn’t reach the audience he desired for it to be shown to. Unsatisfied by the controversy he’d caused with his German-language original, Haneke decided to remake the movie in English so that he could finally send his real target of American audiences squirming in their seats.
For those who haven’t seen the original Funny Games, perhaps there’s something to be found in the committed performances of Naomi Watts and Tim Roth in the remake. The pair of Peter and Paul played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet still hold a creeping passive-aggressiveness. The film has the same sense of sickening dread about it, but this was already done ten years prior. The remake of Funny Games doesn’t need to exist, and simply put, it just smacks of Haneke demanding to be heard. He didn’t get the right lab rats the first time around, so he stubbornly did the test again. This begs the question: why not just do a different experiment instead?
The original Funny Games is a fascinating cinematic experiment, and deserves to be seen for its undoubtedly powerful sense of menace and dread, if not for a document of an expounding director in his most effective mood. But answer me this: if someone was bluntly telling you what a despicable human being you were, would you listen to them give you the same lecture twice?