He makes a point of directing his camera just beyond the scene of horror, so that we can hear it rather than see it, as if that raises him above the brutish level of an Eli Roth. But to have Watts, bound and gagged, hopping across a room in her bra and undies, is not very far from the gloating titillation he's berating everybody else for.
Watts at least maintains a sort of dignity under this savage pressure. Meanwhile, Roth gives such a snivelling performance as the husband — his voice is as ratty as his face — that you half-wonder if Haneke wants us to despise him.
There is nothing more pathetic than the shot of George distractedly taking a bite of a baguette as he tries to put his mobile phone back together.
Haneke has made interesting films about the way violence can suddenly burst through the thin crust of middle-class politesse — see The Piano Teacher, Code Unknown and the much-debated Hidden — and the neutral movements of his camera add up to a very distinctive directorial signature. In Funny Games, however, he has misjudged that sense of detachment. Ten years ago the film felt like an exercise in self-consciousness, a way of investigating our responses to atrocity. Now it feels more like an exercise in self-righteousness, luring us into its sinister scenario, subjecting the characters to harrowing abuse and then berating us for complicity in watching.
Haneke is determined to boobytrap the whole movie, making it unapproachable as an entertainment and insufferable as a moral homily. Through latticed fingers you may be able to discern good work by Watts — the domestic martyr nonpareil — and by Pitt, his cherubic face suddenly alight with the possibilities of his own depravity. Throughout the film he and Corbet wear white gloves, like waiters, or fencers, though you quickly realise that they mean to keep their fingerprints off anything they touch.
The same could be said for Haneke, right in the heart of his own little torture chamber yet sheathing himself from implication in its devilry. I think this is called having it both ways. There is something monstrously patronising in his procedure here; it's almost as if he imagines we don't know that inexplicable, gratuitous barbarity is going on out there, and has taken it upon himself to rub our noses in it.
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