"Funny Games"

I saw a really awful movie last night: Funny Games. I recommend it only because I see it as a metaphor for fascist takeover. Two well-bred young men go from house to house in the Hamptons, killing the inhabitants. But they don't just kill them: first they dominate and degrade them. On reflection, it is clear that they could not succeed if they were resisted, but the victims delude themselves with the hope that this isn't as bad as it seems, that it is a temporary aberration, that it will pass. They try to reason with their tormentors, to placate them. "Maybe if we give them what they want, they will go away." In the process, they become complicit in their own destruction. Just like Germany in the 30s.

The director is the Austrian, Michael Haneke (Hidden, The Piano Teacher). Those whose idea of a "moral film" is one in which the forces of good triumph in the end will find this movie immoral – just as they found Pasolini's Salo: 101 Days of Sodom. Both are an unflinching gaze at human evil, and that is why they are revolting.