CHICAGO – Imagine a film with no redeeming or uplifting emotional qualities with evil that tortures the soul, squirm-inducing narrative elements and a relentless anxiety that practically has us – like the characters in the film – screaming for mercy. Imagine also that this film is excellent.

Naomi Watts in “Funny Games”. Photo credit: IMDb

“Funny Games” is a shot-by-shot remake of writer and director Michael Haneke’s 1997 Austrian film of the same name, which now features American actors and their presumed sensibilities.

Naomi Watts from “The Ring” is Ann: the 30-something matriarch of an upper-middle class American family who’s heading for their vacation home.

Her husband, George (Tim Roth), and son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), are accompanying her. As the family approaches the heavily gated development, a murky apprehension is in the air as familiar friends offer tentative greetings.

The source for all this unease is a pair of boys – the eerie Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet – in their early 20s who are dressed in casual white clothing down to their gloved hands. While they approach the home of Ann and George with the presupposed notion to borrow some eggs, the reason for their infiltration is much more maniacal.

Naomi Watts, Michael Pitt (middle) and Brady Corbet in “Funny Games”. Photo credit: IMDb

They capture the family and begin torturing them. They force them to play a series of barbarous games that take them to the limits of sadistic persecution.

The “funny” awareness of this story is that it’s always edge-of-the-seat compelling despite the bad taste of the power trip by the boys over the family.

Using a deliberate and almost winking-at-the-camera approach, director Haneke creates a meditation on the ruthlessness that is symbolically lyrical.

George as portrayed by Roth is rendered as ineffectual from the outset of the boy’s penetration.

There is a sense of his giving up when his vulnerability is exposed, which leaves Watt’s Ann character as the only saving grace for the family. Is it the youth of the perpetrators that’s doing him in or his immediate capitulation to impotence after being humiliated in front of his family?

Michael Pitt in “Funny Games”. Photo credit: IMDb

The boys themselves – who refer to each other in pop-culture pairings such as Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry or Beavis and Butthead – relish their roles as avenging angels of eternal rest.

Despite shortcomings that are obvious, their ability to control the events through violence and sadism designs a larger measure to their presence and power.

They are portrayed as white god-like creatures with an ability to effortlessly manipulate events within the film while also existing also outside them. One particular action even proves their invincibility, which ratchets the creep factor right up into our faces.

This is cinematic gamesmanship that is simultaneously brutal, bizarre and elegant in its audacity. Like his previous film “Caché” in 2005, Haneke has artistically exploited cinematic structure to play with and engage the mind. It’s a very funny game indeed.

By PATRICK McDONALD Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com