Like most of Austrian-born director Michael Haneke's films, the 1997 German-language movie "Funny Games" is not what it appears to be on the surface. (He's best known in this country for the art-house hits "Caché" and "The Piano Teacher.") At first, "Funny Games" seems to belong to a specific subgenre of nasty horror-thriller flicks: A pair of mysterious sociopaths in tennis shorts and white gloves -- diabolically evil, intelligent and well-prepared -- invades a bourgeois family's vacation home, evidently bent on a series of pointless and sadistic "games" that will end in mass murder. The central plot question seems to be whether the loving couple and their plucky young son will find the resources to survive this descent into feral brutality.
But even as "Funny Games" plays out its thriller conventions -- the narrow near-escape, the non-working telephone, the split-second wrong decision -- it also confounds the viewer's expectations. There is horrific violence in the story, but none of it is shown on screen. As the worst thing that happens in the movie is taking place, we watch one of the intruders making a sandwich in the kitchen. The invaders don't seem to know what their names are, and one of them begins speaking into the camera, observing ruefully that the audience is on the family's side, or noting that they can't kill their victims yet because the film hasn't reached its full running time and lacks a plausible resolution. This tendency concludes in one of the great frame-breaking moments in cinema history, one that reportedly shocked a Cannes audience into silence at the picture's premiere.