Michael Haneke
Funny Games

It is 10:26 PM. 

It’s a warm July evening and I intend to watch a dreamlike, different, yet light film. For once, I decided to steer away from the oriental films that I adore and start rummaging through my endless DVD collection, looking for something that might satisfy my needs. My eyes scan the titles, some of which I didn’t even know I had, until they rest on "Funny Games". Michael Haneke is my favorite European director alongside Lars Von Trier, yet despite having it in my video library, I’ve never given it a glance. Maybe out of laziness, maybe because I was busy watching other things, and to say that the post-videotape paranoia of "Caché-Niente Da Nascondere", the sadomasochistic self-mutilations in "The Piano Teacher", and the intersecting stories in "Storie" had quite captured me. They showcased to me a visionary talent that didn’t stop at boundaries, that wasn’t afraid of censorship or public judgment. Haneke is relentless: he feels no pity for his actors, but instead assaults, violates, and torments them. Even though I would have preferred something more cheerful, I insert the DVD into the player and curl up on the leather sofa, as the film's first images roll.

 A car speeding, a little family heading to their beach house for summer vacation. The two parents challenge each other to a classical music quiz and then, suddenly, an ear-piercing hardcore music floods the screen as the title of the film appears out of nowhere, in bright red.

Despite this sudden fury, the film begins almost like an American comedy, until two men dressed in white arrive asking for eggs. They seem like two kind and ethereal young men, but in reality, they are anything but. They continuously break the eggs through apparent and silly accidents, disable the family’s cell phone, and slowly, naturally take over the house, slowly torturing the fragile souls that make up the peaceful family. It all starts with a fast strike of a golf club against the father’s leg. Even this violence is disguised as an accident, but the terror begins when one of the two whispers, with the usual kindness and smile, "Want to bet that by nine tomorrow morning all three of you will be dead?"

And the nightmare begins, without end. The two guys, portrayed sublimely by the terrifying Arno Frisch and Frank Giering (forget a Michael Pitt any day!). Sometimes Frisch addresses the viewer, as if we were part of the plot too.

As the bet begins, the film envelops itself in an impalpable violence: the tortures happen off-screen, with few splashes of blood, yet the effect is much more effective than twenty zombie films. The screams of a superb and precious Susanne Lothar pierce the film's silence, while the two young men act as if they were doing the most natural things.

Haneke crafts a chilling thriller-horror without staging amputations, monsters, ghosts, or loud music: he permeates the silence, the silence of normality. Yet, in the scene where the child desperately escapes into an uninhabited house and from the dark, the pristine uniform of Frisch is glimpsed, running almost as if he were skipping, chills ran down my spine. The atmosphere becomes claustrophobic, tense, cruel, and here Haneke unveils his skeletons in the closet. When things for the victims seem to turn for the better (the sudden and unexplainable escape of the two tormentors, the woman managing to defend herself with a gun) the nightmare returns: just as they had fled, the two return, and in the scene where Anne manages to kill one of them, the other finds a remote control and uses it to rewind the action.

Haneke is mocking you: there is no salvation, no happy ending, there’s only the nightmare, even if you’re on the good side, the victory will be for the bad guys.

Long sequence shots surround the film, managing to imbue it with anguish and terror, up to the finale of icy coldness.

This is the usual Haneke masterpiece: cynical, cruel, sadistic, but also extremely poetic in its violent blend.

And then, even as the end credits roll, on the same noise-hardcore song heard at the start, the film impresses itself onto my mind.

I have goosebumps and it seems I hear a faint whisper next to me from Lothar saying, "I don’t know any prayers."

00:12 AM

I’m going to bed, but I know I won’t sleep.