Funny games
1997, Austria
WARNING: my review contains a pretty big spoiler. Skip the section enclosed within asterisks (*) if you don't want to know what happens to the boy. However, I suspect that most of you won't want to see this film anyway. In which case, go ahead and read the whole thing. (Subsequent replies by other posters may also contain spoilers, so read at your own risk.)
I'm afraid I can't really recommend this film to anyone, unless you get a kick out of watching gratuitous graphic violence and disturbing scenes.
This film has actually won some prizes and seems to be getting good reviews. It has a 7.1 rating on IMDb, which is fairly high. I understand that the film is very well made and I can appreciated it on that level. The acting and direction are both excellent. But the subject matter is just too intense and the ideas behind it are just not profound enough to make it worthwhile.
The plot: A family of three - mother, father and young son (see pictures below) - arrive at their summer home where they plan to spend a nice holiday. Everything starts out fine, but within moments their house is taken over by two strangers who then spend the rest of the film torturing them and intending to kill them one by one.
Only one word can describe the resulting viewing experience: painful.
The boy is beautiful and very sweet. He doesn't have much dialogue, but there are a few sequences where he is the center of the action. I wish I could say that this makes the film worth watching, but I would say the opposite is actually true. To explain why that is, however, I have to get into some spoilers.
*****warning: spoilers ahead*******
The boy is mistreated from the moment the two psychopaths walk into the house. They hit him a few times and at one point put a pillow case over his head and torture him to force the woman to take off her clothes. He gets his head blown off halfway through the film, and I can't really understand how I managed to sit through the second half after that shock!
I guess that was a spoiler, but I don't think the plot has any significance in this film anyway, so who cares? The filmmakers tried to make a few interesting commentaries with the film to justify all this extreme violence, but overall I don't think it works. If there is a social commentary in the film, it is much too weak to justify this kind of violence. If the point was aesthetic or artistic more than social, then again it fails, as there isn't really anything intersting happening on that level that would justify how painful these images are to watch.
**********end of spoiler zone********
The script gets a little post-modern at times, with one of the two psychopaths turning towards the camera and directly talking to the viewers, asking us how we feel about the film, etc. I guess that was supposed to be clever. At another point, one of the psychos takes the tv remote control and rewinds the film back a few minutes, to prevent something from happening. Again, this is supposed to be cool and make this film an interesting experiment in style, but I can't imagine that anyone would be so naive as to actually buy into it at that point.
Anyway, don't watch the film. It would be nice if someone rented the DVD and made a nice series of DVD captures of the young star, Stefan Clapczynski, to post a gallery. That way, others could at least enjoy that element of the film without having to suffer the rest of it. Maybe I'll do that when I get my new computer. In the meantime, here are a few pics found on Boy Actors of the World.
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images expired
EDIT: Sir Jacob recommended that I add a warning about the spoiler, so I did. Sorry if anyone read this before I placed the warning.
(Edited by josephk at 5:44 am on May 19, 2003)