Funny Games

Director: Michael Haneke

1997 / 111min / 35mm

Austrian provocateur Haneke’s original squirm-inducing, audience-indicting home invasion thriller, shot by the great German cinematographer Jürgen Jürges, unforgettably places captive couple Anne (Susanne Lothar) and Georg (Ulrich Mühe), together with their son Georg Jr. (Stefan Clapczynski), at the whims of a pair of violent young men who take the family hostage inside their lakeside Austrian holiday home. Haneke uses the entrancing channel-surfing-damaged killers to deliver his savage deconstruction of screen violence, which he would pointedly remake shot-for-shot 10 years later for US audiences.