Funny Games

Michael Haneke remade his own 1997 film shot for shot and is direct about why: it was meant for a public of violence consumers in the English-speaking world, but being in German it stayed in arthouses and never reached that audience. Producer Chris Coen brought him the offer and Haneke accepted on condition that Naomi Watts take the lead. Watts is also one of the producers. Details were rewritten for America. In the original, when the phone works again nobody knows the number for the police, which Haneke says is plausible in Austria because he does not know it either; in the United States everyone knows 911, so the exchange had to change. The house was rebuilt, but matching exteriors for identical framing was the hard part. The Austrian shoot ran 6 weeks; this one stretched to 8.5 and he says finishing it was a struggle. The maths failed: a $15 million production returned $8.2 million. Guardian writer Geoffrey Macnab counted that failure among the reasons Tartan Films, a co-producer and its British distributor, closed. A good fit if you are curious about a film that argues with its audience and even rewinds its own scene with a remote. Not for you if you are waiting for the rescue beat a hostage thriller usually delivers.