Funny games video essay

Funny Games may be simple and sadistic in conception, but it is complex and humanistic in its particulars. That’s why it works so well. The director is unusually attuned to the nuances of behavior, to the subtle shifts in power and affection that people experience in desperate circumstances.

It’s a harrowing moment—the first truly repulsive act in a film that will be filled with them. And right then, Paul turns to the camera with the hint of a devious smile, in full-on close-up, and gives us a playful little wink.

(The works of Quentin Tarantino and Wes Craven, so popular around the time Haneke was making Funny Games, are replete with such self-aware tactics.) And like a true genre auteur, Haneke makes sure that Paul’s asides come almost always during, or right before, Funny Games ’ most objectionable developments.

Haneke wants to make an “unwatchable” film—one that disturbs us with its cruelty—but the only way to do that is to make a film that is supremely watchable, one that we cannot simply turn off, or leave. In this sense, the director is like a drug dealer who keeps plying us with just enough of his product to make us beg for more.