Some movies are like a punch in the stomach that takes a long time to recover from. Funny Games by Michael Haneke also belong to this kind of unpleasant experience. The Austrian director has one nasty terror chunk created, which turns into an unbearable nightmare by the minute, until there is no hope at all.
Funny Games you just Stream with Amazon Prime subscription * can, of course, polarized. Legendary director Jacques Rivette (The Nun), for example, has made no secret of his hatred of the film.
Funny Games criticizes media violence with an unbearable orgy of violence
In the plot of the film, the married couple Georg (Ulrich Mühe) and Anna (Susanne Lothar) drive to their holiday home by the lake with their little son Schorschi (Stefan Clapczynski). Here they get a visit from the two young men Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Arno Frisch), who want to borrow a few eggs. After the two are let into the house, the family begins a cruel descent into hell.
Without too explicit details of violence, Haneke stages perfidious psycho-terror, which at the same time Criticizing the cravings of a voyeuristic audience craving extreme heaviness should. The fact that Funny Games uses exactly the means that are questioned and denounced at the same time is an extremely fine balancing act.
Still, the director creates some unforgettably tough moments when, at one particularly devastating point, the film simply rewinds with the remote control after a minor triumph. Here at the latest all hope is in vain.
Director legend hates Michael Haneke’s Funny Games
In a 1998 interview with Les Inrockuptibles (via Senses of Cinema), director and film critic Jacques Rivette was asked his opinion about various films. He gave free rein to his aversion to funny games:
[…] What a shame, just a complete piece of shit! I really liked his first film, The Seventh Continent (1989), and from then on I liked the films less and less. This is disgusting […]
At Amazon Prime you can now get your own impression of Funny Games and form your own opinion about the shocker.
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