Scary statement

Funny Games says a lot about its European director | Sam Thielman

Warner Independent Pictures

The very first thing Austrian director Michael Haneke shows us in the English-language remake of his own film Funny Games is an SUV towing a sailboat down an interstate. It's Haneke's U.S. debut, produced by star Naomi Watts, and the European director wants us to know who these Americans are before we meet them: They're bourgeois fuel-guzzling yuppies, gallivanting around the country to their barely used lake houses in pristine Timberland clothes with little Nokia cell phones. Please, he seems to say, hate them as much as I do.

Haneke has built most of his career on cultural critiques dressed up as thrillers—his 2005 French film Cache ("Hidden") angrily abused its audience's guilty social conscience, but it was tense, subtle filmmaking without any easy answers. You could excuse its lack of philosophical nuance the same way you can excuse the doofusy psychology in most of Alfred Hitchcock's films.