Watch the video. Two violent young men take a mother, father, and son hostage in their vacation cabin and force them to play sadistic "games" with one another for their own amusement. A married couple is terrorized by a series of surveillance videotapes left on their front porch. A year-old video enthusiast is so caught up in film fantasy that he can no longer relate to the real world, to such an extent that he commits murder and records an on-camera confession for his parents. Strange events happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years before World War I, which seem to be ritual punishment. Who is responsible?

Sex, sadism and torture: The not-so-funny games of actress Naomi Watts
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Not necessarily in a bad way; filmmaking is to a large degree an art of control. Michael Haneke, an Austrian auteur who has worked for many years in France, has always been more interested in punishing his audience than in entertaining it. His scrupulously constructed, skillfully made films, many of which have won prizes at leading international festivals, are excruciatingly suspenseful and also, more often than not, clammy and repellent. It is likely that Mr. His is an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism. We will endure the pain he inflicts for our own good, and feel bad about it in the bargain. Haneke takes it upon himself to mete out.
The Ring, King Kong and Eastern Promises star weighs in on Funny Games.
I had just missed the actress two months ago while up at Sundance where I spoke to her co-stars Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett. The untimely passing of former boyfriend Heath Ledger understandably forced her to cancel all scheduled interviews. To get right down to it: There would be no Funny Games without Watts. Haneke has stated before that he would have never moved on a nearly shot-for-shot American remake had the actress expressed disinterest in the project. To do this film was terrifying and that always interests me. When someone is so sure, you trust them. She confesses, also, that the role posed a challenge in that it was hard to turn off her emotions at the end of the shooting day.
She could have been just another rom-com blonde - but the dark side has made Naomi Watts one of the world's top film actresses. Sheila Johnston met her. Naomi Watts shifts restlessly in her seat, as she will do throughout our conversation, and admits that talking about herself is "very uncomfortable". She will hesitate before answering a question, or reply that she doesn't know, or edge around cautiously before reaching a tentative conclusion. Hard to explain why you do what you do. Petite, pretty, an apparent slip of a girl, she's a knot of uncertainties - which, you later realise, conceal an iron resilience.