this is not a movie so much as it is a statement, an essay, a motion picture installation. in it two angels visit a family, torture them for eight hours, then murder them. the family makes attempts to escape but they never have a chance; the game is rigged against them, to the extent that after the wife manages to shoot one of the angels the other one rewinds time and prevents her from doing so. and that's the point, life is a game of torture rigged against us and in the end we all die and there is no hope. but then why make the movie? why not just shoot yourself in the head? does not the act of making a film (the same film twice by the way) and all the time and effort and emotion that go into it presuppose hope? if all life amounted to was torture and death at the hands of whimsically malevolent angels then why bother doing anything? - in this way the filmmaker is dishonest with his audience and his film very much resembles intellectual masturbation. it is true that unimaginably horrible things do happen to people in real life and sometimes there is "no hope." but just because something happened doesn't make it artistically truthful (film a brick wall for two hours - the brick wall is there, it's real, it "happened," but that doesn't make it a movie). often one finds in problematic "art films" that the frail skeleton of the plot is unable to support the heavy flesh of philosophy hung on top of it. in this case the philosophy of the movie is not profound enough to justify the extreme events, and that is a form of pornography. and there are little bursts of ideas here and there, with one angel talking to the audience, the mother turning off the TV, the conversation about fiction and reality, etc. but these are not sufficient excuse for watching a mother, father and little boy tortured for two hours then murdered. there is a lot of tension in this movie but there are no real insights into the characters, little character development, and there is not even any interesting conflict. and i understand that this is, in a way, the point, but this point could have been made in fifteen minutes. and the problem is that it is just that, a point, an essay posing as a film, where the filmmaker is in league with the protagonists (or antagonists), and has rigged the world to prove his point (does this make him the evil, sadistic god who sent his angels to destroy all that is sacred?). one could argue that (another) point was to actually make the viewer sit through two hours of pointless torture. but that again is intellectual hocus-pocus, the result of a lot of pretension and not enough compelling ideas.
Review of Funny Games
