Moments later Paul shows up and, spying her husband's golf clubs, asks politely if he could try one out. After Anna reluctantly gives him four more, she senses something wrong and begins losing her patience. Paul and Peter make a deceptively innocuous entrance when Peter comes to the door and with a fawning, exaggerated politeness asks to borrow some eggs, which he accidentally breaks on his way out. On the car stereo, the couple play operatic guessing games from their cache of compact disks, and the soundtrack pointedly compares sublimely ethereal fragments of Handel with the killers' preference for the screaming rock anarchy of John Zorn. ''Funny Games'' begins in a car whisking the victims, Anna (Susanne Lothar), her husband, Georg (Ulrich Muhe), and their young son, Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski), to their exclusive lakeside paradise.
''The problem is not: how do I show violence,'' he writes, ''but how do I show the viewer his own position in relation to violence and its portrayal?'' The realism of contemporary screen violence, along with its prevalence, he contends, has so thoroughly ''domesticated'' portrayals of violence in movies that it has left a mass audience anesthetized to the most shocking, unspeakable images. The implication seems to be that these MTV characters are the ultimate symptom of a corrupt media climate that glorifies crudeness and viciousness. Now and then, the killers - the sleek, handsome Paul (Arno Frisch) and his pudgy, sniveling sidekick, Peter (Frank Giering) - refer to themselves as Beavis and Butt-head and parody the primal gurglings of the popular cartoon duo.
INVASION 1997 GAME MOVIE
Having tricked us into feeling some hope, the movie mocks us for having been so easily manipulated, then punishes us for having been such fools. Near the end of the film, when one of the victims takes control of a life-and-death situation, the same killer demands that the movie be rewound, and the scenario is revised with a much darker and crueler outcome. Twice in a film that is predominantly hyperrealistic, one of the killers turns to the camera with a conspiratorial leer and asks the wordless question, What are you looking at and why? This beautifully acted and paced German variant of ''Cape Fear,'' which opens today at the Film Forum having traveled around the international festival circuit, is tricked out with a number of Brechtian devices to catch audiences in a voyeuristic trance. ''Funny Games,'' a blood-curdling portrait of a family imprisoned in its idyllic summer home by a pair of sadistic killers, puts that question to the test. Many pundits have speculated that the mass audience has become so inured to movie and television violence that we've begun to lose our capacity for horror and empathy.