* * 1/2

Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, Devon Gearheart, Siobhan Fallon Hogan. Written and directed by Michael Haneke. Rated R. 112 minutes. Warner Independent Pictures.

There will not be a more upsetting film this year than Funny Games, director Michael Haneke’s shot-by-shot remake of his controversial 1997 Austrian tale of a family in peril at the hands of teenaged thrill-killers who force them to submit to horrifying mental and physical cruelty. But this is no torture porn thriller cut from genre cloth. Rather, Funny Games is a stomach-churning indictment of such films, and our complicity in their existence.

A critical assessment of movie violence and our allegiances, reactions and desensitization to the subject, the experience of witnessing Funny Games is pulverizing. We watch a very likable, defenseless family caught in a web of mind games at the mercy of captors, and a director, with no intention of letting the family or audience off the hook. The film makes its points all right, but at what cost? It certainly doesn’t work as a compelling drama in any way, and that may likely be the point.

Upon arriving at their idyllic summer lake house, upscale couple Anna and George Farber (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth) and son Georgie (Devon Gearheart) settle into a perfect summer afternoon to the tune of birds chirping, broken only by the sound of the family dog announcing the arrival of two strange young men who appear the epitome of the country club, prep school elite.

The first (Brady Corbet) wishes to borrow eggs as a ruse to enter the home, and in an expert sequence of rising tension, he first breaks them and then destroys Anna’s cell phone. Exasperated, she throws him out only to encounter another strikingly similar, yet more confident version (Michael Pitt). Watts very capably details the small shifts in trust and tension that culminate in an altercation between the young men and husband George, swiftly incapacitated with a golf club to the kneecap.

Things descend from there, and soon the happy family is bound and subjected to vile degradations the likes of which have never been seen in a mainstream film, terrorized to the tune of two vapid, preening and flamboyant monsters who strip them physically and emotionally, dismantling their psyches and bodies with a promise to kill them by sunrise. Somehow, we know they are not kidding. Neither is Haneke.

Funny Games is often infuriating, an exercise with little depth that preys upon our basic sympathies for a likable couple while serving up two blank, nearly interchangeable attackers who dress, talk and behave like twins, pracing around in ivory tennis outfits and speaking with affected cadences. There are no motivations, deep secrets, revelations or character discoveries to be had. It is all a game of cons and manipulations.

With a few minor changes, Haneke has remade his film obviously wishing to reach a mainstream American audience with his message. Yet something in this new version feels more immediate, due largely to a devastating turn by executive producer Watts, who pulls out her considerable emotional stops in a role that requires her to play every situation imaginable as a mother, wife and woman under duress. She breaks down so convincingly she actually has drool and other fluids dripping while the actress heaves and falls apart onscreen. And Roth, emasculated early in the film, can do little physically but hits notes of great sorrow. We feel so sympathetic toward them that it makes the experience of sitting in the theater like being held in a vise, helpless to help them.

I doubt Haneke ever thought these two characters would engage us so in the context of a statement film deliberately self-conscious and laden with artifice as villains speak directly to the camera and the director rewinds a critical violent moment to produce a radically different outcome. It begs the question that if Funny Games continually removes our investment from the story by restating its own existence as a film, why should we be so affected?

Well, because we care deeply for Watts and Roth, in a human way that is primal. And contrary to what Haneke believes, applauding a single moment of self-defense is altogether incomparable to egging on sadism, a tenuous correlation he reaches to establish, implicating us in this sordid mix by suggesting that we are quick to congratulate "acceptable" violence while condemning it from the perpetrators. The notion is ludicrous. Who doesn’t want to see good people survive?

It should be noted that Haneke wisely leaves all explicit physical violence offscreen in an attempt not to revel in what he indicts. But the film feels more visceral than it really plays, because our imaginations fill in the blanks. However, Haneke certainly doesn’t mind showing extreme emotional barbarism and the psychological tolls of the terror. There is a lot of pain and suffering in Funny Games, and it isn’t fun.

It may sound like I disliked Funny Games, but I stuck with it nonetheless. No one will enjoy it, and mass audiences will certainly reject it wholesale as it is noncommercial is every sense, from its chamber-piece pacing to its winking fey attackers to its downbeat ending.

Ultimately, Funny Games itself is an unintentional descent into the sadism it criticizes us for routinely embracing. Yet despite its pretensions, I am glad I saw it, though it is certainly falls short of Haneke’s best films: Cache, The Piano Teacher and Time of the Wolf. 

Funny Games, with its deliberately manufactured torture in service of a finger-pointing lesson for its audience, is nothing more than a repugnant stunt dressed up with two great performances in service of hollow characters marching toward doom.   

-Lee Shoquist