Media Platforms Design Team

Ten years passed before I could summon the courage to rewatch Michael Haneke's 1997 provocation Funny Games. I bought the DVD the week it came out, and it just sat on my shelf, mocking me -- as maddeningly placid as its two nattily dressed serial killers, who turn up at an ordinary family's vacation house and proceed to torture and murder them for laughs. When I finally sucked it up and took a second look, it was even more brilliant, and more repugnant, than I'd remembered. Well, at least he'll have to tone it down a little for this American remake he's doing, I consoled myself. I don't think I could take that again so soon.

Welcome to my nervous breakdown -- and yours, potentially. Funny Games U. S. A., as the new version has been dubbed, has to be the most perverse movie ever released by a major American studio, or even by a studio's dedicated indie arm (in this case, Warner Independent). I don't know what form of temporary insanity led some suit to conclude that a mass audience was ready for this experience, but I'd like to shake the dude's hand before he's led off to the guillotine. And that's assuming that angry moviegoers brandishing pitchforks don't get to him first.

Hollywood remakes of challenging foreign films are usually watered down until they're safely innocuous. The Vanishing, an unforgettable 1988 Dutch thriller, ends with the hero buried alive, screaming into the darkness; the U. S. version, made five years later -- and directed by the same guy -- ends with the hero (now Kiefer Sutherland) buried alive . . . and then dug up by his girlfriend, who helps him defeat the bad guy and restore order. Cue pop song.

Haneke is having none of this shit. Not only is his original, almost unbelievably grim finale intact, but Funny Games U. S. A. as a whole represents the most painstaking, uncanny duplication of a feature-length film ever made. If I didn't know better, I'd swear that the new cast -- Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the terrorized couple, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as the smiling sadists -- had been digitally pasted onto the original Austrian sets. Not a single tension-filled, anxiety-inducing shot has been altered.

And therein lies the paradox that's going to rile folks up: A diabolical (some would say hypocritical) moralist, Haneke wants to make us question the pleasure we receive from watching people suffer; Funny Games '97 anticipated the Saws and Hostels that would find mainstream success a few years later. At the same time, though, he delivers more genuinely gut-wrenching horror than all of those films put together, even while keeping most of the violence offscreen. Unlike the hacks he's scolding -- and very much like Hitchcock -- Haneke understands how to use film language itself as a weapon.

At regular intervals, the killers turn to the camera and address the audience, asking us who we're rooting for and whether we want them to stop. And the catharsis we desire -- that climactic moment when the battered victims finally turn the tables on their tormentors -- is given to us and then cruelly, surreally rescinded in a way you almost have to see to believe. Funny Games is a masterful torture-porn film that implicitly castigates the viewer for sitting through it. Its true and lasting violence is inflicted not upon its characters but upon us.

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