Directed by Michael Haneke • 1997 • Austria
Starring Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch
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.
Up Next in Directed by Michael Haneke
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Code Unknown
Directed by Michael Haneke • 2000 • France
Starring Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Alexandre HamidiOne of the world’s most influential and provocative filmmakers, the Oscar–winning Austrian director Michael Haneke diagnoses the social maladies of contemporary Europe with devastating precisio...
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The Piano Teacher
Directed by Michael Haneke • 2001 • France
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Benoît MagimelIn this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award–winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world ...
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Benny’s Video
Directed by Michael Haneke • 1992 • Austria
Starring Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich MüheMichael Haneke turns the unflinching gaze of the camera back on itself in this provocative, profoundly disturbing study of emotional disconnection in the age of mass-media saturation. Benny (a frighteni...
