Director	Michael Haneke
Length	114 mins
Certificate	18
Rating	Film making: 4  Personal enjoyment: 4

Funny Games U.S. is Michael Haneke's American remake of his own 1997 German-language Funny Games, a pitiless 'arthouse' take on the horror and thriller genres. Both films tell the story of the terrorisation of an upper-middle class family at the hands of two similarly affluent youths, whilst also simultaneously forcing the audience to be aware of its own position as viewers of violent cinema.

This film is practically a ‘shot-by-shot’ remake - closer to its predecessor even than Gus Van Sant’s much-reviled 1998 version of Psycho (1960). As such, and since its cast is similarly strong (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth in particular give harrowing performances) it works almost precisely as well as the original, expertly building up a sickening tension, while also occasionally puncturing it with Brechtian alienation effects. The interesting question that the film raises, though is: why was it made in the first place?

Haneke’s answer has been that the original is a didactic tract on film violence that he intended for consumers of horror movies themselves - thus, he says, bringing it to a wider audience (by Anglicising it) ensures that he will be able to ‘educate’ a great many more of the right kind (read ‘wrong kind’) of viewers. I have no reason to doubt his sincerity, however it does smack to me of an arrogant and small-minded view, not just of horror films and horror audiences, but of his own movie itself. I will go into more detail in my Alternate Take, but I think that Haneke has made (now twice) a film that, rather than simply standing at a distance and wagging its finger at horror, is actually a fascinating example of horror cinema itself, and as such testifies to the flexibility and potentially interesting uses of the genre as a whole. Funny Games is, I think, a better and more complex film than its director would have us believe.

This at the very least goes for the original, which first gave us this story and concept, but how are we to assess the remake? Can we value it for doing the same things just as well as the original does? We certainly can if we look at it in isolation, and indeed it is in one sense refreshing to see a remake that manages to maintain both the tone and quality of its original! But watching Funny Games U.S. in the context of Funny Games unavoidably brings another kind of viewing experience to the table. As with Van Sant’s Psycho, it virtually involves watching the two films simultaneously, immediately creating yet another level of distance from a film that is already emphatically asking us to view it in quotation marks. And yet, at the same time, its hugely intense content means that it does still work emotionally and viscerally on the senses too - thus complicating our response further still.

Ultimately, this film is frankly perfectly constructed, and will likely provide just as effective an experience for first-time viewers as the original, working in all the same complex, frightening, and energising ways. For those of us who know the original, it will probably work in all these ways again, whilst also opening up even more questions than does its template. In this respect, because of its nature as an essay on the ramifications of cinema viewing, it could be argued that this is one remake that actually outdoes its master copy.