It’s not that there is no precedent for what German filmmaker Michael Haneke — flush with the cachet afforded by 2005’s Caché — has done by remaking his scandalous 1997 film Funny Games on the other side of the Atlantic. It’s that the precedent is very, very bad. Recall the sad case of the Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer, who helmed an American version of his brilliant 1988 chiller The Vanishing; the film, which deviated from the original’s gut-punching ending, was the equivalent of a white flag timidly raised in the face of the mainstream-movie machine

There are no such capitulations in Funny Games 2.0: it’s a shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake of its source material, pulling double duty as a screw-tightening thriller and a repudiation of same. The expertly familiar set-up finds a wealthy vacationing couple (played here by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) and their young son (Devon Gearhart) held hostage in their own summer home by a pair of interlopers (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett) in tennis whites. And then Haneke demolishes the fourth wall — his sadists establish eye contact with the audience and politely inquire as to our expectations for the evening.

“I’m trying to impart in my films what mainstream movies work to take away,” explains Haneke in an exclusive interview. “Namely: reality. I’m making movies that are inconsumable. And I can only do that by portraying the suffering of the victim, rather than the enjoyment of the perpetrator.”

Actually, Funny Games does a bit of both, as the (literally) winking blitheness of the antagonists exacerbates the suffering of the victims. “You can’t forget the importance of entertainment,” chides Corbett to his drained, bound-and-gagged quarry, neatly encapsulating the film’s thesis — that the irresponsible portrayal of violence onscreen has desensitized us to its real-world effects — and also the bludgeoning pedagogical dynamic between director and viewer. Does Haneke the funny gamesman feel any sort of kinship with his villains, whose omnipotent control over the proceedings — there’s a bit with a VCR remote that is the last word in objectivist cruelty — make them seem like nothing so much as a pair of callous auteurs?

“To some extent, an author always identifies with the figures he creates,” says Haneke cautiously. “If you think of Shakespeare writing Richard III, of course he identifies with him, but that doesn’t equal being in the same frame of mind.”

The invocation of Shakespeare is appropriate given Pitt’s conspiratorial asides, delivered with the same nerve-prodding snottiness of Arno Frisch’s performance in the original. Funny Games draws much of its power from Haneke’s genius for camera placement, but he is also uncommonly good with actors. He certainly gets the most out of the typically inert Pitt, to say nothing of Watts and Roth, whose commitment to their through-the-wringer roles is total and astonishing.

“One of my conditions for doing the remake was that Naomi Watts would play the main character,” says the director, who recalls seeing her in (noted Haneke-biter) Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams. Watts nails the film’s gruelling centrepiece scene, a frieze of bereavement that is either Haneke’s most callous bit of button-­­pushing or one of the rawest, most authentic depictions of grief ever shot.

“You can’t have any fear about being misunderstood,” says Haneke, who is used to it by now. He’s long been dogged by charges of misanthropy from critics who can’t (or won’t) see the compassion underpinning his confrontational tactics. “I hope,” he continues, “that the effects I use make [the film] difficult to misunderstand.”

Funny Games really isn’t difficult to understand, but while the filmmaking is airtight — there’s very little actual violence, which short-circuits the possibility of anybody getting their video-nasty jollies — the pedantic slant of the material will grate on those who don’t see themselves as requiring a remedial lesson in the politics of spectatorship.

Haneke has said of the original that those who “don’t need [it]” should have no compunction about walking out, while those who do will have to ask themselves why they sat through the whole knowingly inexorable horror show. This nifty bit of rhetoric elides the question of why such a talented filmmaker should spend his time scoring such easy points.

Why he’s doing it a second time is actually easier to figure out: Haneke says that he had always conceived Funny Games as an assault on American films, and that the remake merely serves to place the action in its correct context. (It also creates severe cognitive dissonance; my eyes kept scanning the impeccable, palpably Euro-art-house compositions for subtitles.) Over the past decade, American genre flicks have only grown more sadistic.

“This makes my film even more up-to-date than it was before,” laughs Haneke. So what about the trailers, which make the film look like the very dreck it means to critique? 

“If that kind of marketing brings in the audience that I want to reach, then that’s fine,” says Haneke. “The bigger the audience, the better… every filmmaker feels that way. The difference [between myself and other filmmakers] is that I am not willing to make any concessions within the films themselves.” 

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