Winking at the Audience, or: How Michael Haneke completely unnerved me during 'Funny Games'

I am used to watching movies in a very static way. I don't like interuptions from other audience members; I don't like mobiles ringing, I don't like snide comments directed at the screen, nor loud popcorn-chewing, and I especially don't like when someone nudges me and says "wasn't that wicked?"
Distractions in general are annoying. When certain people - like myself - watch a movie they want to be engrossed in the experience. So when something like this breaks the spell it is irritating and unwelcome.
Funny Games, by Michael Haneke and starring Ulrich Mühe, is a movie that distracts and disrupts you on its own, but to a very different result.
The film is directed with a level of detachment and calm that is completely at odds with its subjects, long takes and unblinking passivity juxtaposed against a very real and frantic situation. A family is being maliciously harassed by a pair of bored and egocentric youths who have subtly and weirdly entered their vacation home. Pain, death, psychological torment, violence, sadism - all these thing, if given the Hollywood Treatment, would have been formatted around shaky-cams, quick edits, eerie and insulting soundtracks, and things that randomly emerge from out of the camera's frame of view. In this movie, however, there are no tricks like that. The only music comes from car stereos and a family's sound system (save for a very real exception during the opening credits). The camera seems static. It sometimes doesn't shift focus from the players for what seems like an eternity. It sees everything and reacts to nothing.
Yet a different kind of trick is used that makes this movie so teasingly unnerving that at first you barely notice it.
It begins when one of the tormentors, known sometimes as Paul (Arno Frisch), asks Anna (Sussanne Lothar), the mother, to find the family dog. He follows her, playing the game Hot or Cold with her, teasing her as she searches. "Hot... cold...warmer...warmer...burning..." Soon enough she is approaching the family vehicle which is placed directly in front of the camera. Paul stands in view, back to the camera, watching her. Then he turns and winks at the camera.
It happens and you barely notice it. If you do notice it you don't really know what to make of it. Until this point we've just been witnesses, safely separated by the fourth wall. Nothing is supposed to come back to us, because the characters do not know we are there. So when Paul winks at us, at you, the effect is a bit off putting. But unlike an annoying audience member, you keep watching because this is intriguing, it is meant to be. It means something.
Later on, when the whole family is being briefed by their captors as to what is going to happen, Paul makes a bet. He bets that they won't be alive by early morning. They family is terrified, and cannot say how they will bet, so Paul decides to ask someone else. Once again he turns to the camera, smiles convivially, and asks us how we will bet. Now the fourth wall isn't just breached - it's been burned down. As though you were peeping through a hole in a shower curtain and suddenly the bather decides to tear down the curtain to let you know that, yes, they knew you were watching and, yes, they want you to keep watching.
It's perverse, this intrusion into our lives. We came to watch a movie, not to be called into play. We like horror movies and so-called "torture porn" because we are safely shielded from the scrutiny of those we are watching. What do we do when they want us to join in, when they so smugly assure us that they know we are there?
We keep watching, shamed into further viewing by our hosts.
It goes one step further, however. Paul tells us, "You're on their side," which is true, we want them, at least one of them, to escape. "So," he goes on, "who do you bet with?" And there is the real question. When we watch these movies, when we know we will see people harmed, why do we root for them to escape? Aren't we watching to see our heroes be destroyed? We are on their side, of course, because they are us, but would we really bet on them surviving?
So as the family's lives are shattered, as they are tortured and beaten and terrorized, we watch on and desire nothing more than the end.
Haneke is not without his sense of irony.
Soon enough Paul responds to Anna and her husband Georg's (Ulrich Mühe) pleading for an end to it all. "We're not up to feature film length yet."
By this point we the audience don't care. This isn't fun anymore. This isn't a movie, this is an admonishment against our own desire to see pain inflicted on others through the safety of our television sets. But we keep watching, because it is a movie, it is only fake, and we are invested in these characters and their fates.
I am tempted beyond all reason to explain the final, wicked, vindictive twist that shows us just how far these captors will go to deliver what they believe to be a satisfactory end to the story to us, the viewer, but I will not. If you watch this movie - and you should - you will know it when it comes. No amount of foreshadowing of fourth-wall-busting can prepare you for it. It's a moment when we cheer, puzzle, and then cry out in shock.
Very rarely do movies entertain at the same time that they comment on the film form itself. (For another fine example, though less sadistic, see The Prestige) but Funny Games does just this. But it also adds on another layer.
This is a movie that is in-tune with a modern desire to see violence done upon its people. Not real violence, but fak violence. Hostel, Saw, Touristas, these movies give us the carnal satisfaction some of us want. Funny Games leads us in with this promise, but then delivers a wind-knocking punch to the stomach that shows us a darker face to these movies. When we watch these sorts of films, or any film, we aren't simple viewers - we are complicit with the evil forces that drive the plot, as much to blame for any characters' suffering as those who inflict it in the movie itself.