The Italian opera arias flows through the serene forest on a clear road, and then you are stomped on the face by bold red credits and obtrusive rock music with dreadful howls and screams. Two psychopaths are on a rampage of death and deception, with no clear motif they hunt rich families in most suave manner by playing games, bluffing, discussing their career paths and pseudo-science, and all the while winking at the viewer. Haneke smirks on our experience of watching and predicting films/stories, he points out and flips over all the defaults that gives the viewer a sense of attachment with the protagonist, a build-up leading to excitement in his suffering, instills fear for his safety/success and finally saves him for that happy ending. This film is not exclusively of effluent well mannered people who listen to Bjorling, Tebaldi and Gigli and go to secluded posh villas on holidays and are vulnerably helpful. It's about anyone who is not hunting; it's about the total control of the hunter over his kill i.e. the games he plays with them by the rules he makes for his pleasures and ours. The two laddies promise entertainment, makes us realize our voyeurism and keep their part of the deal by delaying death, by playing hide and seek, by giving a chance to their kill to participate to escape and sustain us on our seats by giving us hope before 90 minutes are over. Haneke increases the viewers level of involvement by breaking the fourth wall and thinning the line between reality and fiction, reversing the sequence we wanted, deploying false escape device to question our intelligence, freezing the frame from a distance and not giving close-up shots of the protagonists and thus making us think about what we are watching, what we expected and what we want next to happen.
Review of Funny Games
