Funny Games

Ann, George and their ten-year-old son Georgie arrive at their lakeside holiday home to find two polite young men, Peter and Paul, at the door asking a small favour. The visitors claim to be guests of the neighbours, and their manners hold until they stop being polite. What follows is a drawn-out ordeal in which the family is held captive and made to take part in a wager about whether any of them will still be alive the next morning.

The film was directed by Michael Haneke from his own screenplay, and it is an English-language retelling of his 1997 Austrian film of the same name, moving the setting from Austria to the United States. It is the eleventh of the fourteen features he has directed, coming after Caché and before The White Ribbon. Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart play the family, with Michael Pitt as Paul and Brady Corbet as Peter. It was produced by Rene Bastian, Andro Steinborn and Andrea Occhipinti and made for around 15 million dollars, a sum it did not recover at the box office, where it took in about 8 million dollars worldwide.

It runs 111 minutes and sits among the crime, drama, horror and thriller genres, with an international production spanning Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States and France. On IMDb it holds 6.5 out of 10 from over 110,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.5 from a much smaller number of votes, while the film critics' rating stands at 6.1 from 145 reviews.