Check Out the Trailer

I recently read THE EXORCIST director William Friedkin state that FUNNY GAMES was the scariest movie he’s ever seen. That of course made me want to see it right away. It’s not as scary as Mr. Friedkin’s pea-soup spitting little girl, but it has a chilling and disturbing quality that reminded me of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and IRREVERSIBLE.

FUNNY GAMES, like the previously mentioned two films, addresses the way we view violence on the big screen. Anna (Susanne Lothar, THE PIANO TEACHER), Georg (Ulrich Mühe, AMEN) and their young son Schorschi (Stefan Clapczynski) are on vacation at their lake house. While Georg and his son are down by the water, Anna begins preparing dinner when a clumsy, fat young man named Peter (Frank Giering) comes asking to borrow some eggs. Anna is cordial with the young man, but soon becomes more and more frustrated with him as he wrecks her kitchen.

As the scene progresses, the seemingly innocent situation becomes more and more unsettling. Why is the preppy dressed young man wearing white gloves in the middle of summer anyway? Then Peter’s friend Paul (Arno Frisch, BENNY’S VIDEO) pushes himself into the house, insisting that he be allowed to try out Georg’s expensive golf clubs. It takes the barking of the family’s dog to bring Georg and Schorschi back to the house, where Paul assaults Georg and the twisted young men’s “funny” mind games begin.

Anna and Georg demand reasons for why Paul and Peter are toying with them. Paul just gives cliché excuses. At times, Paul even breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera directly, creating two different effects in the viewer. It makes Paul seem even more unbalanced and also implicates the audience as voyeurs in Paul’s twisted game.

What FUNNY GAMES doesn’t do is provide us with expendable characters like other horror films. We care about what happens to Anna, Georg and Schorschi. So when violence happens to any of them, we are more emotionally affected than films like SCREAM, which possess a self-referential tone that distances us from the bloody events taking place on the screen.

In HENRY, we start with a typical cartoony horror movie kill scene then move toward a brutal attack on a family in one single shot. It’s this unblinking look at violence that is used in both this film as well as IRREVERSIBLE. However, unlike IRREVERSIBLE, FUNNY GAMES does not dwell on the bloody parts; it’s more interested in the emotional results of random violence.

Unlike your typical horror movie where one superhero like character can put aside all physical and mental injury to triumph over the killer(s), this film unblinkingly looks at the effects of the events on the victims. There’s even one scene that will have the viewer reflecting on the killer/victim relationship in real life and on the screen. What’s gripping about the film is that it’s a brutal mind game that doesn’t allow us the typical relief that films of this nature often have. Sadly, it reminds us that when it comes to random violence, it existed before, exists now and will exist forever and there is little we can do to truly understand why.