Back to the sawing board

If you are in the market for unspeakable horror but wouldn't be caught dead slinking into "Saw IV," Michael Haneke is definitely the go-to guy for you. "Funny Games," his latest postmodern smackdown, is about a happy middle-class couple and their young son whose summer cottage is invaded by a pair of psychos. The night I saw the film, the audience had a look of expectant dread as the house lights lowered. The look said, "Are you tough enough to take it?"

"Funny Games" is actually a shot-for-shot remake of Haneke's 1997 German-language original, a movie I thought I had seen the last of. But like a recurring plague, "Funny Games" is baaack -- in English this time, and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. It takes a special arrogance to remake one's own movie frame by frame. Was the original so perfect?

Haneke has stated that he redid "Funny Games" to make it more accessible to Americans as a reaction to Hollywood movie violence and the way "American cinema toys with human beings." Look who's talking. When it comes to toying with audiences (or gullible cineastes), Haneke is peerless. All directors, of course, manipulate their viewers, but few are as fetishistic about it as Haneke. Every sequence, every shot in "Funny Games" is another coil in his mousetrap.

Ann (Watts), George (Roth) and Georgie (Devon Gearhart) are introduced as a model middle-class family. They have a blissful sunniness. Then two blondish young men in shorts and matching white shirts, one calling himself Paul (Michael Pitt), the other Peter (Brady Corbet), insinuate themselves into the lakefront cottage and proceed to methodically maim and torture everybody.

Why? When George, writhing in pain, pops the question, Paul replies, "Why not?" Haneke is not a big one for answers. (In "Cache," his highly touted art-house creepfest, we never really find out who sent that bookish bourgeois couple all those tapes and nasty drawings.) Haneke systematically dismantles any psychosocial explanations for the boys' blood lust. Paul offers up for the family a checklist of convenient interpretations -- all lies: Peter is white trash, gay, a drug addict, a criminal, incestuous, his father was an alcoholic. My favorite of Paul's fibs: "He's jaded and disgusted by the emptiness of existence."

In a generous mood, one could argue that Haneke is going for a truer portrait of violence by relinquishing the usual freaky Freudian, society-made-me-do-it baggage. But his solution is also a cop-out. He is saying that the causes of violence, at bottom, are not only unknowable but not worth knowing.