Funny Games is a 1997 Austrian satirical psychological thriller film written and directed by Michael Haneke, and starring Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, and Arno Frisch.

[3] A shot-for-shot remake, filmed and set in the United States, was released in 2007, also directed by Haneke, this time with an English-speaking cast and a mostly American crew.

George Schober, his wife Anna, their son Georgie, and their dog Rolfi arrive at their lakefront holiday home in Austria.

On the drive over, they spot their next-door neighbors Fred and Eva Berlinger accompanied by two young Viennese men whom they do not recognize.

Shortly after the family settles in, and while Georg is still setting up the boat, the other young unidentified man comes to Anna's kitchen to borrow eggs on Eva's behalf.

This man, later named as Peter, gradually overstays his welcome by breaking successive batches of eggs and knocking the family's phone into the kitchen sink water, all seemingly done by accident.

Paul reveals he has killed Rolfi, and taunts Anna with a cruel searching game (during which he turns around and winks at the camera) until she finds the dog's corpse.

Anna finds herself forced to introduce Paul as a family friend and to provide false excuses for Georg's absence, but she also tells Gerda that they may come over after dinner.

Paul, the more eloquent of the two, punctuates the torture with frequent breaks in the fourth wall and warped role-playing wherein he relates contradictory stories of Peter's past and ridicules his weight and apparent lack of intelligence.

No explanation of the men's origins or motives is offered, and even their names may be pseudonyms since they also call each other Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butt-Head on occasion.

Author Joanna Bourke states that through these fourth wall breaks, "audiences have to take responsibility for being desensitized to violence and the pain of others.

When Anna successfully shoots Peter, potentially initiating a heroic escape for the family, Paul uses a remote control to rewind the film itself and undo the event.

After Peter shoots Georgie, Paul scolds him for killing the child first because it goes against convention and weakens whatever suspense remains in the storyline.

His short essay revealing how he felt on the issue—called "Violence + Media"—is included as a chapter in the book A Companion to Michael Haneke.

[7] After the 2007 American remake directed by Haneke used the same house including props and tones, Robert Koehler of Cineaste wrote that this "proves for certain that—whether he uses the great cinematographer Jürgen Jürges (for the 1997 version) or the great Darius Khondji (for the new film)—Haneke is fundamentally his own cinematographer exercising considerable control over the entire look of his films.

[7] In an interview, film director and critic Jacques Rivette made his displeasure with the movie clear, calling it "a disgrace", "vile", and "a complete piece of shit.

The site's critical consensus states: "Violent images and blunt audience provocation make up this nihilistic experiment from one of cinema's more difficult filmmakers".