How Do You Review A Film That's Not A Film?

Warning: If you haven't seen Funny Games yet, this review contains spoilers.

Put a CD in a CD player and you expect sound. Put an orange in a blender and you expect juice. Put an Israeli in Palestine and you expect death. Put a movie on, and you expect to feel something.

Or so that's what I thought. Little things that you just expect to happen often leave you wide open to get a big smack of surprise in the face. So when I finished watching the remake of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, you can imagine the emptiness inside when I genuinely didn't know how to react.

At it's most basic, Funny Games is a thriller. A family made up of Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and their young son go to their vacation home on a quiet lake, only to find themselves hostage in their own home to Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet. The two men initiate a series of sadistic games including making the family members choose who dies first. Throughout the film Pitt's character Paul constantly breaks the 'fourth wall', communicating with the audience and teasing them how their expectations of the film will not match up to the events that occur.

Roth and Watts struggle somewhat with very little material. When trying to portray the same emotions for 110 minutes, their performances become very stale. Pitt and Corbet's performances are very difficult to comment upon. Draped in white like their saintly names suggest, these two drive the film. Whilst they are by far the most entertaining assets in the movie, everytime they are on screen the film becomes excruciating and agonising to watch. Thanks to their on screen actions of torture and sadism, the virtually soulless and emotionless portrayals of these characters induces the audience to hate everything about them, including their performances.

Funny Games is also a lesson as much it is entertainment. Haneke proves a point with the material, commenting on the Western world's love of violence as Peter (Corbet) and Paul nonchalantly dispatch of the family. Indeed, the films most entertaining moments are when Peter and Paul are on screen, toying with the family and making bets with them that they'll all be dead by a specific time. In the last act when Peter and Paul leave (in Paul's words to make the film more dramatic to give George (Roth) and Ann (Watts) a chance to escape), Haneke slows everything down dramatically, with hugely extended camera shots and long periods of little dialogue. During this time, I craved the return of the two antagonists just to inject a bit of entertainment back into the film.

And here lies my point. Haneke has made Funny Games in such a way to manipulate the viewer that you can't really pass judgement on it. It's difficult to have any kind of opinion of a film which channels your judgement into a narrow corridor. In Haneke's own words, 'if you don't walk out halfway through the film, then there's something wrong with you'. The thing is, if you don't walk out, your left with a very strange feeling inside of emptiness. Not whether it's good or bad. Not whether you feel utterly shocked at the splattering of a young child's insides over the walls of the house. Not whether you feel confused when Peter grabs the TV remote and rewinds the film to alter his actions. Just a hollow sensation as though you just missed out 2 hours of your life.

Watch Funny Games. Experience a completely different way of watching a film. But just don't to expect to be able to answer the question 'was it any good'? Because I've been sitting here for over an hour trying to answer the same question, and as you can tell by the complete lack of direction in this review, I'm still stumped.