The ideas behind Haneke's Funny Games

Micheal Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games (the original German-language version; he remade it in English ten years later) is a cruel and frightening movie, like many of his movies btw, about a home invasion in which two men, intelligent and psychopathic, torment and torture a family of 3 - parents and young son - in their vacation home. It's almost unbearable to watch (though hard to stop watching), which is as it turns out the point of the film. If it were just a horror/snuff picture, we wouldn't even be talking about it, we wouldn'e ever have seen it. But Haneke is into something deeper and more reflective (spoilers coming) as he breaks the 4th wall of cinema and has one of his characters - one of the invaders (Paul) address you the viewer at several points - particularly near the end when he alludes to the process of watching a movie: We viewers expect that the movie will have an ending that makes the film "real" or "credible," something in the script that will explain who these killers are and what motivates them. But no, nothing like that happens, it's just motiveless malignity (cf Iago), which makes us think about the "reality" of this film or any film: A film is always an illusion, it is not reality, and we're wrong to expect everything to be tied together in a film, or for that matter in life - there are no answers, and when films wrap everything up in 90 minutes (or, today, 2 hours and 40 minutes) that's just an illusion, a convention. In the strangest element of the film Paul grabs a remote and rewinds so as to re-take one of the action scenes; this tripe makes the film both less realist - the wall is broken, we no longer think we're watching something w/ a plot - and more realist, as we are rminded that we are watching a film: Art is the reality.