Michael Haneke’s new movie is an Americanised replica-remake of his 1997 cult shocker Funny Games: just as before, it’s an icy ordeal of sadism, a macabre vivisectional experiment in pure cruelty, practised upon a bland upper-middle-class family – two parents, tousle-haired kid, adorable dog – which thinks itself safe in its prosperous cocoon. And just as before, it caused my stomach muscles gradually to contract to about a sixth of their original volume. Repeat performance this may be, but its brilliance and technique and ingenuity are still in a different league from anything else around. It is horrifying, genuinely horrifying, in a way that regular horror films never are, and somehow never expected to be.

PJ O’Rourke once wrote that there are two kinds of dangerous: fun-dangerous, like speedboats and race-cars, and not-fun-dangerous, like open-heart surgery or the South Bronx. Haneke is a great believer in making us experience the second kind of dangerous. What his target American audience will make of this is anyone’s guess: maybe the National Rifle Association will use it as a recruitment video. Or maybe it will be the surprise smash of 2008 and Haneke can franchise it out to every foreign-language territory in the world.

It is famously not explicit in the usual sense: you don’t see the actual gory impacts. But it is explicit in a far more horrible way, making us live through the anticipatory fear, and giving us a closeup view of the victims’ horror and despair. The critical convention with violent movies is to compare them to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and there is an obvious similarity here: after a while, you will feel, like Malcolm McDowell’s punished delinquent, that you are watching with your eyelids clipped open. 

[ click to read rest of review at Guardian UK ]