If it sounds like Haneke is trying to have it both ways here—exposing our complicity while coddling our sensibilities—that’s because he is. But that, too, is in the spirit of the genre he’s simultaneously targeting and perfecting: violent thrillers always go through the motions of putting us on the side of their protagonists, even as they ultimately deliver on our not-so-secret desire to see those same people victimized, sometimes even killed.

When young Georgie is killed, Haneke again tips his hand in a way that lets us off the hook: this time, instead of a direct address to the camera, Paul wanders off into the kitchen while his sidekick, Peter, does the killing. We hear the offscreen shrieks while, on-screen, Paul casually makes himself a sandwich. While this moment does not technically break the fourth wall, it does function as something of an aside. And it’s one of the film’s most outrageous scenes—the nonchalance with which Paul prepares his sandwich is, in some ways, even more monstrous than what’s happening in the other room. But again, Haneke presents us with a stylistic indulgence that cuts both ways. For all its cruelty, this scene relieves us of actually witnessing the act itself.

Directors cutting away from graphic, disturbing images is, of course, nothing new, and Haneke is both following in and interrogating this tradition. He has cited directors like Tarantino and their savvy ability to edit around the violence, leaving everything to our imagination. To do it so openly, and brazenly, reveals the nature of the artifice, which is yet another way that Funny Games tickles and teases our most sadistic impulses. Because we are not shown the act, we are able to keep looking. Haneke wants to make an “unwatchable” film—one that disturbs us with its cruelty—but the only way to do that is to make a film that is supremely watchable, one that we cannot simply turn off, or leave. In this sense, the director is like a drug dealer who keeps plying us with just enough of his product to make us beg for more.

By stringing us along in this way, Haneke reveals the unnerving lie that governs the spectacle. For it is not the victims’ side that we are on but the perpetrators’. Without them, there is no suspense, there is no violence—there is no movie. As much as we are horrified at what is happening—and, assuming we’re not actual monsters, we should be horrified—Paul’s gleeful asides constantly pull us back to the truth of the matter, to the bloodlust that drives so much of modern filmmaking.

But if that were all there was to Funny Games, there wouldn’t be much of a film to talk about. For all his bold framing devices and metafictional indulgences, Haneke is not a mere pop-culture scold, here to tell us all the ways in which we are bad viewers (though he sometimes seems content to play this part in interviews). Funny Games may be simple and sadistic in conception, but it is complex and humanistic in its particulars. That’s why it works so well. The director is unusually attuned to the nuances of behavior, to the subtle shifts in power and affection that people experience in desperate circumstances. (This is also why his 2007 shot-for-shot English-language remake of Funny Games doesn’t quite succeed: working with different actors and in English, Haneke is unable to conjure a realistic, compelling family; they remain two-dimensional, and thus the cruelties inflicted on them never quite resonate.)

At the time that he broke out with the original Funny Games—most of his subsequent work would be produced in France, with bigger stars—Haneke was still making films for television, the medium in which he had started his career. These TV features were often adaptations, and quite different tonally from the movies that would later define him as a director. Though we can see some of his stylistic flourishes and thematic preoccupations in embryonic form in these early efforts, there’s also an intimacy, an obsessive attention to emotional detail that runs through them.

In a number of these titles, we find Haneke breaking down the briefest, most offhand interactions and ruminating on the forces that shaped them. In 1976’s Ingeborg Bachmann adaptation Three Paths to the Lake, he presents the story of a middle-aged woman joining her father at his lake house, where each exchange and gesture seems to open up new narrative pathways into her memories and past experiences. Haneke’s powerful 1993 film of Joseph Roth’s post–World War I drama The Rebellion is a genuinely humanist portrayal of a loyal amputee veteran’s unraveling in a society with increasingly little use for him.

In these early dramas, the nihilism about the cruelty of the world is there, but so, too, is a certain sincerity—a kind of warmth toward his protagonists, a desire to imagine their lives in full. This foregrounding of the human has never entirely gone away. Indeed, perhaps because of his reputation as a provocateur, Haneke does not get enough credit for his masterly understanding of psychology. An obsessive attention to the minutiae of individuals’ emotional lives is what fuels the panoramic narrative of Code Unknown (2000), for example. And it is the deep reserves of tenderness toward his subjects that give The Piano Teacher (2001) and, certainly, Amour (2012) such power.

You can see this in Funny Games, too, where the subtlety with which the family is drawn is overwhelmed and ultimately undone by the base, unreflective inner lives of the villains. The picture operates in two conflicting modes—the realistic and the generic. “I . . . try to build models in my films, but ones that are ‘filled with the world,’ where the effect is not just metaphorical but steeped in a verifiable reality,” Haneke told Film Comment in 2009, adding that “most film genres . . . offer prototypical modes of behavior that only interest me if I can reflect them as a filmmaker.”



