- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2007
- Countries:
- Predominant Genre:
- Crime
- Directors:
- Michael HANEKE
- Outstanding Performances:
- Michael PITT
- Naomi WATTS
- Premiss:
- Two psychopathic young men take a family hostage in their cabin.
- Themes:
- Alienation
- Compassion
- Destiny
- Emotional repression
- Empathy
- Friendship
- God
- Grieving
- Humanity
- Identity
- Loneliness
- Loyalty
- Narcissism
- Political Correctness
- Self-expression
- Sexual Repression
- Social class
- Solipsism
- Stereotyping
- White culture
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Funny Games (1998)
- Review Format:
- DVD
How Caucasians Are
A crime that provides solace for one’s existential angst is a game that can only be played with others. And this movie plays with its characters as much as with its audience. We are all required to play and, by continuing to watch, implicate ourselves in a betting game: Can most of the characters survive until the following morning?
The survival chances of the White, middle-class characters - with whom we are parodied for empathizing with - is limited. Their view of life offers them meager survival skills: They are just as spoilt as their tormentors are depraved.
The Brechtian emotional distancing of this drama pokes fun at its own mise en scène as well as at an audience that demands vindictive violence in the guise of a claim to be decent, law-abiding and condemnatory of violence. It also reveals who the central character is: The director.
It is difficult to empathize with a married couple too complacently unable and unwilling to do something as simple as protect hearth, home and life. Not playing funny games would have prevented this problem, but the unwillingness to act preventively - rather than curatively - decreases ones survival chances. An gram of prevention is worth a kilo of cure is a metaphor for practically everything, so that this film can only be a treatise on the value of intelligence over emotion - this being the only way to defeat those who choose mental illness as a way of life.
The White belief that everyone in the world should be like them undermines itself when it becomes clear they are actually worse than others. The fact that Whites refuse to face this simple fact is evident in the White ghetto shown here where, despite escaping from “those others”, they find - instead - that the real threat comes from within the community within which they believe themselves safely ensconced. The belief that outsiders are the only serious threat is thus merely an alibi for Whites self-contempt.
The movie satirizes the White, middle-class obsession with focusing one’s energies on self-control (rather than self-discipline) and assuming one’s destiny is always within one’s own control. Yet, these beliefs can be in conflict - as shown here - because they produce inflexibility in the face of change.
Serial murders are a peculiar feature of White cultures and reflect personal anomie and cultural alienation: The kind that gives White films like this their credibility. To ask before the event the question “Why?” makes sense; but to ask it during and afterwards is a sign of personal impotence and is in no way a substitute for not asking before. It is akin to the White crying over spilled milk that occurred after 9/11.
Unusually for a remake, this movie is almost as good as its German-language progenitor.
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