Michael Haneke

Funny Games

Funny Games

Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, Funny Games spares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men. In a series of escalating “games,” the sadistic duo subject their victims to unspeakable physical and psychological torture over the course of a night. A home-invasion thriller in which the genre’s threat of bloodshed is made stomach-churningly real, the film ratchets up shocks even as its executioners interrupt the action to address the audience, drawing queasy attention to the way that cinema milks pleasure from pain and stokes our appetite for atrocity. With this controversial treatise on violence and entertainment, Haneke issued a summation of his cinematic philosophy, implicating his audience in a spectacle of unbearable cruelty.

Film Info

  • Austria
  • 1997
  • 109 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.85:1
  • German
  • Spine #975

Director-Approved Special Edition Features

  • New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Michael Haneke, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New interviews with Haneke and actor Arno Frisch
  • New interview with film historian Alexander Horwath
  • Press conference from the 1997 Cannes Film Festival featuring Haneke and actors Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri

Purchase Options

Director-Approved Special Edition Features

  • New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Michael Haneke, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New interviews with Haneke and actor Arno Frisch
  • New interview with film historian Alexander Horwath
  • Press conference from the 1997 Cannes Film Festival featuring Haneke and actors Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri
Funny Games
Cast
Susanne Lothar
Anna
Ulrich Mühe
Georg
Arno Frisch
Paul
Frank Giering
Peter
Stefan Clapczynski
Georgie
Doris Kunstmann
Gerda
Christoph Bantzer
Fred
Wolfgang Glück
Robert
Susanne Meneghel
Gerda's sister
Monika Zallinger
Eva
Credits
Director
Michael Haneke
Screenplay by
Michael Haneke
Producer
Veit Heiduschka
Director of photography
Jürgen Jürges
Sound
Walter Amann
Editor
Andreas Prochaska
Set design
Christoph Kanter
Makeup
Waldemar Pokromski
Music
Händel Georg Friedrich
Music
Pietro Mascagni
Music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Music
John Zorn

Current

How to Implicate an Audience
How to Implicate an Audience

Michael Haneke explains the strategy and inspiration behind his fourth-wall-breaking tricks in the brutal thriller Funny Games.

Funny Games: Don’t You Want to See How It Ends?
Funny Games: Don’t You Want to See How It Ends?

With this controversial treatise on violence and media, Michael Haneke created a spectacle that is both intensely watchable and hard to stomach.


By Bilge Ebiri

Joel Potrykus’s Top 10
Joel Potrykus’s Top 10

With his features and new short film, Thing from the Factory by the Field, currently playing on the Criterion Channel, the writer-director selects ten movies that influenced his style.