Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Austrian film of a decade earlier is not what it sounds like. Not fun and games, not funny ha-ha, not charades and Mad Libs. It has a good deal in common with his Caché, the clean tidy uncluttered images, the spooky absence of mood-punctuating background music, and, as a basic plot premise, a civilized family unit of husband, wife, and prepubescent son, suddenly unsettled in their contentment, shaken in their stability. We encounter them (Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and, well able to simulate terror when required, Devon Gearhart) on the road in their SUV, towing their sailboat, the parents playing a game of Name That Tune with their opera CDs, en route to their gated vacation home on the lake. The good life. While it lasted. The abrupt interruption of Handel on the car stereo with the shrieking cacophony of John Zorn, as the blazing title fills the screen, is a forecast and a fair summary of what’s ahead: the Home Invasion of every property owner’s nightmares. The invaders (Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt, identically coiffed with unruly over-the-eye locks of hair) do not come on strong, in Clockwork Orange-style or even Desperate Hours-style; they come on sneaky, oddly dressed in co-ordinated white gloves and white-knit tops, but well-mannered and soft-spoken, like members of the Stanford tennis team. The tension is probably most unbearable, and most “effective” in the way of a conventional thriller, before the good manners give way to violence, before the cards are laid on the table. Once they have tipped their hand, the situation becomes somewhat static and monotonous, an extended exercise in discomfort, as the twin sadists put their victims through hoops; and the tension, in consequence, moves more into areas of style and treatment: the tension between the invaders’ increasing cruelty and their continuing mild manner; the tension between the victims’ unreal and melodramatic predicament and their natural and lifelike reaction to it; the tension between the crude thriller plot and the refinement of the presentation, the discreetly off-screen violence, the detached and clinical viewpoint, the fastidious visuals, the intellectual challenge to the viewer’s expectations and hopes. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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