Funny Games

It's Hostel set at a yacht club. Imagine two young, more effeminate Patrick Batemans that have a special taste for upper-middle-class families.

Funny Games is a shot-for-shot remake of writer and director Michael Haneke's 1997 film of the same name, except set in America. Haneke thought the themes of the film, gratuitous violence and audience culpability, were more pertinent in America than his home country Austria. Ann (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) along with their son Georgie (Devon Gearheart) make up your typical yuppie family. Soon after arriving at their vacation home for a two-week break, the family gets paid a visit by Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbert), two 20-somethings straight out of the country club.

What follows is meticulously crafted savagery. Paul and Peter, "jaded by the emptiness of existence," bet the family that they will not be alive by morning and force the family to undergo a series of "games" and tests. Paul and Peter get into petty quarrels. Their immaturity contrasted with the fate of the family makes the reality of the situation even more terrifying.

Games' ensemble is fantastic. Watts, also an executive producer for the film, is empathetic and pitch perfect, and Pitt is perfectly perturbing.

Haneke's overall message is pertinent and expressed in an unforgettable fashion. At certain moments throughout the torture, Peter breaks the fourth wall and asks the audience, "Do you think that is enough?" The film is a stark, revelatory look at America's (or humanity's) obsession with gratuitous violence. Haneke is playing a trick on his audience, intentionally reminding them of their guilt and involvement with the mayhem that occurs.

Funny Games is not exactly entertainment. Impossible to love, difficult not to respect, it's a film that you won't be forgetting for a while.