Stranger danger

A cold-blooded tale of two young killers who terrorise and mentally torture an ordinary couple and their son.

Naomi Watts in Funny Games

Funny Games (MA15+) 3 stars Limited national release ELEVEN years ago, Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke made Funny Games, a controversial film in which he set out to deconstruct movie violence by means of a cold-blooded tale of two young killers who terrorise and mentally torture an ordinary couple and their son.

The film, in German, played the world's art-house cinemas and has been available on DVD, but it seems that Haneke was concerned that very few people in the country that produces most screen violence, the US, saw it. Hence, presumably, the decision by the auteur to produce an almost shot-for-shot remake in an American setting and with name actors (though, interestingly, not Americans: the unfortunate couple is played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth).

Needless to say, the Americanised version didn't do much more business in America than the foreign original, and now that it is, rather belatedly, arriving on Australian screens, you wonder why Haneke bothered. He made all his points the first time around, and the present film says nothing new.

Watts and Roth play Anna and George Farber, a well-to-do couple that, with their son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart) arrives at the family's summer house, which is located in a gated area beside a pristine lake. They notice two rather odd-looking young men (Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet) at the home of their neighbours, and they register that the neighbours are behaving a little oddly.

Then the youths, whose names are Peter and Paul, arrive at their house to borrow eggs, and innocent events gradually become sinister as the "games" begin. Very recently, The Strangers tackled an almost identical theme (masked killers invade the isolated home of an attractive young couple) without attempting to explore Haneke's concerns; but the comparison is interesting because, in the end, there's little difference between the two films.

It's true that Haneke doesn't actually show any violence taking place, and that his shocks are more subtle; but in the end both films play on the jangled nerves of the audience as the "good" people with whom they identify suffer terrible fates, and for what reason? Neither film offers any kind of reason: it's just a game, a movie, it isn't real.

It goes without saying that Roth and Watts (the latter credited as an executive producer) give fine performances as the terrified couple and that the film is meticulously made. But, in the end, it seems like an exercise that wasn't really worth attempting; even with little-known German actors, the film worked better the first time, when the ideas were fresh.