Georg (Ulrich Muhe), Anna (Susanne Lothar) and Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski) are a wealthy family spending their summer relaxing at their lakeside vacation home. Not long after they arrive Peter (Frank Giering), a seemingly shy young man, appears claiming to be borrowing eggs on behalf of a neighbour. A similar young man named Paul (Arno Frisch) soon joins him. Peter and Paul take the family hostage, casually playing their 'games', inflicting violent psychological torture as a pre-cursor to the bloodbath that is to come later in the night.

Funny Games has won numerous awards in film festivals around the world, including Cannes and Chicago. Artfully directed by Michael Haneke, the acts of violence committed by Peter and Paul are never explicitly shown, yet the effects of their aftermath make it possible to vividly imagine what must have occurred. While constantly being confronted with realistic and terrifying consequences of the violent acts, the film toys with the audiences conscience by making it feel complicit in the family's torture. We continue to watch the two men carry out their gruesome game, and so the game continues. As in his previous films, Haneke is concerned with the ever-present issue of violence. Like Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Funny Games attempts to force the audience to really think about the consequences of violence, and about how it is represented culturally. Haneke wants to make the audience feel uneasy, breaking through the barriers of desensitisation built up from years of experience in a culture which tolerates, if not actively encourages violence in entertainment and everyday life. He succeeds with a film that is both horrifying and gut wrenching.