Funny Games: does the family die? Haneke answers the question twice — and rewinds one of the answers
Michael Haneke's home-invasion film sets up a hostage situation and then does something no thriller is supposed to do to its own footage. Here's how the ending works, and why he filmed the whole thing a second time ten years later.
Haneke's 1997 film opens with two polite young men in white gloves asking to borrow eggs. It ends with a bet being collected, and the route between those two points includes the most hostile gesture any director has ever aimed at an audience.
Yes. All three of them die: Georg, Anna and their son Georgie. The film is explicit about it and Haneke builds the entire structure so that the outcome is never actually in doubt — Paul announces the terms early, wagering that the family won't be alive at nine the next morning. What makes the ending famous is that the movie briefly gives you a different answer, lets you enjoy it for about eight seconds, and then takes it away in front of you.
The order in which it happens
- Georgie — shot first, in the living room, entirely off screen. Haneke holds on a television set with a motor race on it while blood runs down the screen behind the frame.
- Georg — the father, whose leg is broken with a golf club early on, is shot with his own shotgun after the rewind.
- Anna — taken out on the lake in the family's boat the following morning, hands bound, pushed into the water without ceremony while Paul and Peter discuss fiction and reality.
Paul then walks into the neighbors' house and asks to borrow eggs. The film ends on his face, looking into the camera.
The rewind
Halfway through the last act, Anna gets hold of the shotgun and shoots Peter. It is the only moment in the film where the victims win anything. Paul scrambles for the remote control, points it at the screen and rewinds the film to the second before she reached the gun. He then removes the weapon from play and the scene replays with the correct outcome.
The gesture isn't magic inside the story. It's Haneke informing you that the film is his, that the rescue you were waiting for is a convention he can revoke, and that wanting it makes you complicit in having sat through the previous hour. Paul spends the film winking at the camera and asking whether you think the family stands a chance.
Haneke has said he set out to deliver a message about violence in the media by making an extremely violent but otherwise pointless film.
Cannes reacted accordingly at the 14 May 1997 premiere: roughly a third of the audience walked out.
Jacques Rivette called the film "a disgrace," "vile," and "a complete piece of shit."
Why he shot it twice
In 2007 Haneke remade Funny Games in English, in America, shot for shot, with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as Ann and George and Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as Paul and Peter. Same running time, near enough. Same rewind. Same ending.
The remake is the second answer in the headline, and it answers the same question the same way on purpose. Haneke's argument was aimed at the audience that consumes this genre most, and the 1997 Austrian original was, by design, not reaching it. Duplicating the film without adjusting a single beat is itself the point — there is no version of this story where the family survives, including the one made for a market that expects them to.
The bet
Paul's wager is the film's only real clock: dead by 9 a.m. He wins it. He and Peter then move next door, and the cycle restarts with a new household, which is the closest thing Funny Games offers to a moral.
For the record: the 1997 version runs 109 minutes and holds 73% on Rotten Tomatoes. Ulrich Mühe, who plays Georg, would later carry The Lives of Others. Arno Frisch, who plays Paul, had worked with Haneke before as the teenager in Benny's Video, which is a piece of casting that does a lot of unspoken work.