Funny Games

Horror as a genre has come a long way from the 90s. At the very least in the U.S., most of our 90’s horror was your classic slasher film starring wild, sexy teens getting murdered for their raging hormones. When you imagine a 90’s horror flick you usually think of something like Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), or steamy gothic horror flicks like Dracula (1992), Sleepy Hollow (1999), or Interview with a Vampire (1994). Of course, you had incredible and iconic outliers like The Blair Witch Project (1994) and The Cube (1997), but the general trend in the American horror scene was going for the kind of movie you’d bring a date to, hoping you’d have an opportunity to cuddle up while watching Hollywood’s most beautiful being menaced by a menagerie of psychopaths. Not so with a certain Austrian psychological horror film by Michael Haneke. Releasing in 1997 overseas, and 1998 domestically, the iconic film Funny Games took to the scene, and turned all of that on its head. 

Funny Games is a subversion to the very marrow of its bones. It is a film that in many ways seems to be provoking you, chastising you even, for having the audacity to watch it. It seems to be doing everything in its power to make you disgusted with it. It thematically shares a lot of DNA with an earlier Haneke film, Benny’s Video, which shares two lead actors with Funny Games. Arno Frisch, who plays the eponymous Benny in Benny’s Video, plays Peter in Funny Games. Ulrich Mühe plays a character named Georg in both Funny Games and Benny’s Video. In brief, Benny’s Video is a disturbing and extremely bizarre film about a young, apathetic boy named Benny who films a video of the execution of a pig with a captive bolt pistol, and then murders a young woman with the selfsame weapon. The film covers the consequences that follow this event, but it is strikingly unemotional, cold, and unsatisfactory. It seems intent on leaving you dissatisfied or bewildered with every development in the plot. Funny Games does something somewhat similar, but instead of withholding, it subverts and disgusts.  

Funny Games is, naturally, in German, and opens with an Austrian composer, the song “Quartet for Clarinet, 2 Violinists, Viola and Violoncello” in A Major plays over footage of a typical middle-class family driving their boat to their vacation home, while the parents play a loving game where they guess the performer and composers of various classical songs. The film sets the scene, into something relaxing and comforting, middle class gentility, middle class culture, and middle class comfort are shown in the sunny and idyllic interior shots of the car. Mother and father tease each other, smile sweetly at one another and their son. It’s a picture-perfect family. Mother guesses correctly, and switches the CD to a song that stumps father, he cannot figure out what song it is. Suddenly, in an abrupt and non-diegetic fashion, the classical song is intercut with “Bonehead & Hellraiser” by Naked City, a bizarre, off-putting, experimental metal song disrupting the cultured peace of this family’s life.  

The family largely does not react to the song as though it is really playing, but their happy contented chatter becomes silence and confusion as the song goes on. Their world is disrupted, early in the film, and we sit in discomfort for a long time before normality returns.  

Funny Games is, on the surface, about this disruption of the lives of this normal family at the hands of two monstrous young men. While watching, you almost don’t expect anything bad to happen. Forgetting “Bonehead & Hellraiser,” the start of this movie seems very normal, like you’re watching a family unpack and settle in to their vacation home. It looks almost like a home movie, or a family film in the vein of Lassie, with their cheerful dog barking around the house, welcoming them home, they greet their neighbors, who seem a bit strange, but friendly and familiar.  

When our first antagonist, Paul, shows up, we almost don’t expect anything to go wrong. He comes in politely, he’s well dressed, he’s a sweet boy, and he asks to borrow some eggs. What follows is almost a comedy of errors. The nice young man drops the eggs on his way out, and has to ask for some more. The lady of the house, Anna, is a little put off, but politely cleans them up and gives him some more when asked, this time wrapping them. He thanks her, but quickly drops them again. She is less amused, less friendly, as he has also managed to drop her landline phone into a sink full of water, destroying her only means of contacting the outside world, seemingly by accident. Frustrated, she once again gives him some eggs, but he drops them again because he gets scared by the barking of their dog, Rolfi.  

This is when Paul, the leader of the two, appears. Rolfi does not like either of them. After attempting to calm Anna by reminding her that they’re friends of their neighbors, and explaining that Peter is scared of dogs, he admires her husband’s golf clubs and then asks to use it outside, even against the din of Rolfi’s near constant barking. After a moment, we hear his barks are cut short. The horror has begun.  

Funny Games is a movie that is positively disturbed, and positively revels in it. In a typical slasher film, violence is anticipated. It’s a release of a buildup of tension. We know where to expect it; in dark places, where we’re stranded, whenever we’re alone. Once our protagonist is by themselves and away from the group, or engaged in a passionate embrace, we know that blood is soon to come. In Funny Games, the violence is the worst part of the movie. It is sudden, and disruptive, and uncomfortable. It doesn’t have the same catharsis as violence in a slasher flick, which often seems to be an inconvenience, something that someone can shrug off to flee screaming in terror or something that poignantly ends someone, putting a firm coda on their presence in the film. In Funny Games, violence is lasting, the worst of it is typically offscreen, and we largely only get its gruesome consequences.  

The first violent act is entirely offscreen, we never see Paul harm the dog. Instead, we have him pleasantly returning to Anna and Peter, praising the effectiveness of the golf club, before Georg arrives at the house to find a frustrated Anna and two unknown guests, who are now demanding the last four of her eggs. Anna is agitated, irrational, and to Georg seems unnaturally upset by their guests, but he respects his wife’s feelings and asks them to leave. They agree, but insist on getting the last of their eggs, with Paul taking point, getting pretty cheeky in the process. What follows is Georg slapping Paul and demanding that he leave his house, which is followed by Paul taking his driver and using it to break Georg’s leg.  

It happens so quickly, so suddenly, that you would almost think it was a playful little tap, but its consequences are severe and immediate. Georg’s leg is broken, and it only gets worse as the film progresses. Even this tiny act of violence has a powerfully huge impact on the story, and leaves the family shaken and terrified. Despite the film making violence something ridiculously unfun, and gravely serious, it is lightened by the antagonists, or rather one of the antagonists, Paul, who works constantly to undermine every standard, and to subvert every expectation that one has when coming to watch a film. 

To say that Paul delights in violence wouldn’t exactly be accurate. It would be truer to say that he’s giving the people what they want. Paul is acutely aware that he is in a movie, and that the audience is watching it wanting to be entertained. Once he’s warmed the audience up by breaking Georg’s leg, he invites the family to play some fun games with him, all of which have violence as the punchline. All the while, he quite literally winks at the camera, first when he makes Anna play “Hot or Cold” to discover where he hid the corpse of her dog, whom he’d beaten to death offscreen. Then at several points throughout the film Paul goes from smiling at the audience as he brutalizes the family members, to addressing us directly, asking questions of us like “who do you want to win? Are you rooting for the family?” and making quips like “we can’t end the story here; the movie isn’t even feature length yet!” He is always in control, in a way that even Peter isn’t. He plays with every idea you have about how horror movies are meant to go, and taunts both us and the family, assured of his victory. He does everything within his power to break the movie, and he thoroughly succeeds in doing so. According to Haneke in his essay “Violence + Media,” Funny Games is a critique on violence in media, which he attempted to make by creating a pointlessly violent film. He contends with the idea that violence in media’s purpose is to hold up a mirror to reality, and the idea that violence in media promotes violence in reality. In fact, Haneke has stated publicly that he hates violence, and it seems that this movie agrees with him.  

Though Peter and Paul are detestable figures, they are simultaneously the most interesting and entertaining parts of the movie. There is a tension, not so much within the film, but within the audience, where we are fascinated by these maniacs, yet we detest every victory they have onscreen. Our stomachs sink at the thought that they might succeed, and simply move on to the next victim. We root for our heroes, but we also find a small part of us wishing for the villains to return whenever they’re gone, we desire some kind of catharsis, but when the release of violence occurs it’s never satisfying, never enjoyable. By being a film so off putting, so disgusted with violence, it disgusts us to violence, and in doing so, make us really consider who we are, and why we put the film on in the first place.