A piece of film criticism as much as it is a film, Funny Games is a remake by Michael Haneke of his own 1997 thriller. I understand what Haneke is trying to do with this excruciating tale of two strangers (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) who torture a couple (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) in their rural vacation home. He’s pushing the subject matter beyond the arena of “entertainment” (Hostel, Saw) and forcing us to confront violence as it really is: consequential and serious. Yet Haneke is trafficking in the very thing he means to critique. If the pot means to call the kettle black in order to make a larger point, that still doesn’t change the pot’s color.
