Film Road to Halloween: Funny Games (1997)

The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 73 days to go.

Funny Games was the first movie that ever truly upset me. Michael Haneke’s aggressive provocations and what at the time I saw as forced moralising, made me genuinely angry. It was the first film I rated half-a-star. I even hate-watched his 2007 English remake, near disgusted by how important Haneke must have thought the film was to remake it.

But after 2016, the world around me changed, the world within me changed. Everything feels inverted, twisted, strange. I found myself dreaming of imminent destruction. I realised it was finally time to go back to Funny Games. My mind much more open, and perhaps more importantly, more desensitised.

Haneke is plenty aware of the provocations he’s making, he likely would chuckle darkly at my reaction all those years ago. There is a pitch black humour running under the whole film, maybe even driving it. Bourgeois classical music plays from the car of the blank slate, but notable rich family. Multiple close-ups show the change of CD, heavily emphasising it in a way seldom seen in Haneke’s oeuvre.

More on the Film Road to Halloween: It Follows

Another similar sound piece plays, until suddenly, intensely aggressive music blares non-diegetically over the peaceful image of the family driving. The vocals yelping well beyond recognition. ‘Funny Games’ appears on screen in thick red letters. If I didn’t make the sound of this song clear enough, other tracks from this bands include; ‘Perfume of a Critic’s Burning Flesh’, ‘Sack of Shit’ and ‘Pigfucker’.

These obvious and forceful provocations continue with Paul, the leader of the pair of young men who torture this family with their ‘Funny Games’, as he breaks the fourth wall, involving us, indicting us, in the extremity. He turns to the camera, winking at us, as the Mother, Anna, is about to open her car door, finding her dog as it limply falls out. Dead. Aligning us with such a sadistic, though charismatic, character, and in a way that feels almost humorous, is bound to upset.

Haneke knows this perfectly well. He has never catered to a mass audience, but he never again pushed them away so aggressively. Even with such force, Haneke mischievously evades clarity in my favourite provocation. Paul tells the family what made his friend, Peter, or as he calls him ‘Fatty’, so twisted. The story of an Oedipal mother making him her ‘Teddy Bear’. Peter starts to cry.

More on the Film Road to Halloween: Annihilation

If I hadn’t seen the film twice before, I would have start scribbling down notes. But this is, of course, a lie, Peter’s tears suddenly dry up. Instead the reason is simply ‘why not?’. They come from families of privilege, of middle to upper class emptiness. Not much different from the family they are torturing. Haneke never quite makes the link, despite stating that the film is a criticism of the medias ‘pornographic’ presentation of violence, that that’s what moulded Paul and Peter.

Though the implication is there. It seems a fair assumption to make. That message is quite obviously problematic. Blaming violent media for real life violence continues to this day, it is in the headlines at the time of writing this. There has been little evidence of this link, even if there is some specifically for violent pornography.

I could easily dismiss the film on that basis, many people would. But I think to do so is to try and ignore a deep conflict in criticism. A critic is supposed to assess the value of a film, what ever that means. The message naturally plays into it. But to throw away a film purely on ideology is especially difficult in this medium, since one of, if not the, most significant film ever made, The Birth of a Nation, is unquestionably racist. We, or at least I, do not want to airbrush way what makes us comfortable, painting an incomplete view of the film, and of history.

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But, perhaps unfortunately, Funny Games is not good enough to make an interesting case study for this idea. Haneke’s evasiveness turns to incoherence. It’s hard to see, from the text itself, what he’s trying to say. What the message actually is. Every instance of extremity and violence is shown offscreen. From Anna being forced to undress, to the Child being shot as we watch Paul make a sandwich.

The only exception is when Anna quickly grabs the gun, shooting Peter, we are invited to enjoy this catharsis after ninety minutes of torture. We seem to be on the families ‘side’, as Paul mockingly suggests early, in direct contradiction with the films constant attempts to align us with its villains.

Haneke takes away that catharsis, that one moment of hope, in his ultimate provocation, in the tradition of the eye cutting scene in Un Chien Andalou, or even Buñuel’s much less seen Los Olvidados, where the disaffected young male protagonist throws an egg at the camera. Paul goes not for the gun, but for the TV remote. He rewinds the scene. All hope is artificial, a construction for our entertainment. Mirrored when the young men leave the house, giving the family a small chance to escape, only to drag them back in.

More on the Film Road to Halloween: The Conjuring

But this moment again relies on our investment in the family, in the narrative of the film, which has so frequently been contradicted. Up until the final shot, when Paul smiles wryly at us, the frame freezes, and that music blares again. At points, Haneke is doing some of his best work, the infamous egg scene deserves all the praise it’s been given, and then some.

For me, the most affecting, the most unbearable, the most powerful scene, takes place just as the young men have left. Anna sits silently in the living room, her child’s blood runs down the TV that still plays loudly. She hops over to it, her arms and legs tied up, and turns it off. She can’t bear to hear it for a second more. It’s her first priority. Her husband lays on the floor, lifeless. When she tries to get him up, to take that chance to escape, all of this hits him.

We watch his panic attack play out in full. Over this excruciating ten minute shot, we feel the weight of everything, the camera’s emotional blankets only revealing it more starkly. I had to stop myself from skipping through its most painful moments. This scene is as far away from the fourth wall breaking as any other, and, for a moment, I had forgotten all about it.