Dir. Michael Haneke, UK/US/France/Austria, 2007, 112 mins
Cast: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet
Review by Carol Allen
This is an English language re-make by Haneke of his own 1997 German language original, which incidentally starred the late Ulrich Muhe from The Lives of Others in the role now taken by Tim Roth. The reason for the remake, claims Haneke, is because the first version was a reaction to a certain kind of violent American cinema but, being a foreign language film, it never reached a wide American audience. And maybe he insisted on directing it himself to ensure no-one Hollywoodised it by either making it more explicitly violent or giving it a happy ending.
Relocated to America, this is a horrifying story about an ordinary middle class couple and their young son vacationing in their remote lakeside summer home, who are violently terrorised by two quietly spoken, well mannered young men, who gain admission to the house via an apparently innocent request for the loan of some eggs. It is sickeningly violent but we rarely see any of the actual violence, only the results, which makes it all the more terrifying. As, for example, when Paul, one of the boys (Pitt) is in the kitchen making himself a sandwich We hear a shot from the living room, but don't see what's happened until we see the blood spattered television and part of a dead body. The director never lingers on the bodies or the wounds. A sequence where the son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), escapes to a neighbouring house and discovers the fate of their neighbours is totally chilling but again, we see nothing specific. Suggestion and our imagination does the work. Even when Anna the wife (Watts) is forced to strip, all we see are her naked shoulders and the creepily lascivious reaction of the two boys. The scene is about power and humiliation rather than sex. The direction is skilful, relying on atmosphere and suggestion from the very opening, when very civilised classical music is playing in the car as the family journey to their holiday home, which suddenly changes with the opening credits to something ugly, harsh and jarring, preparing us for what is to come.
Watts is, as usual, superb. We suffer with her, particularly in the long and painful scene filmed in one wide shot of her trying to free herself and her husband after their tormentors appear to have gone. Roth is good in the less powerful role of the husband, rendered impotent for most of the film by his injuries, and young Gearhart is very convincing. The two assailants with their neat clothes, girly hair cuts and public school manners are totally chilling. Despite their American accents, there is something very reminiscent of the Hitler youth about them.
There are times, however, when the film itself loses conviction. At one point, Anna escapes from the house, giving us hope that she will survive. It stretches belief when, rather than this desperate woman knocking on the door of one of the houses she is passing, she accepts an ill judged lift from a passing car. Haneke's suggestion, made through Paul's occasional remarks to the camera, that we the audience are party to this outrage by sitting there watching the film, is also questionable. Violent films express the dark side of real life humanity, but the idea that watching them encourages violence in society is open to debate, although there is some case for saying that they feed the appetite. While not exactly enjoyable the film is admirable both in it's skill and the sincerity of its intention. It is, in some ways, analogous to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, which also implicated the audience in moral responsibility for the action. That film virtually destroyed Powell's career for many years. The German language original of this one kick started Hanecke's, which must say something about today as compared to 1960.
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