Why would you want to watch a film about a couple and their young son held prisoner and tortured by a pair of bullying psychopaths?

The couple are played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, and the movie opens with their arrival at a secluded Long Island vacation house. Their tormentors are Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, a preppy-ish pair in tennis whites and matching gloves. Insinuating their way into the house by claiming to be guests of their neighbors, they begin playing mind games in the way that bullies do, making difficult requests and pushing them into a confrontation while pretending not to understand their discomfort. Before long, the game escalates into physical abuse and, not to give anything away, slaughter.

This is the plot of Funny Games, which may sound like a grindhouse thriller but is actually an arthouse film from the controversial Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Cache).

His not terribly helpful answer to the question posed above: “It’s a film you watch if you need this film. If you don’t need it, you go away. If someone has stayed to the end, he needed to be tortured during that time to understand.”

Actually, Haneke is talking there about the original version of Funny Games, made in Austria in 1997 (the quote is from an interview on the DVD), but there’s no reason not to take it as applicable to this remake. That’s because, in what is surely one of the most rigorous exercises ever carried off in a feature-length film, the new Funny Games is, with few exceptions, a shot-for-shot clone of the original.

A deliberate act of provocation, Funny Games confronts viewers with the accusation that by paying to consume depictions of violence we are complaisant with that violence. Sounds like fun, huh?

The surface criticism of Haneke’s work here is to note that he’s put himself in an impossible loop: In order to condemn cinematic violence, he has made a movie with violence that is too unbearable to watch, so that the only sensible reaction is to not watch it, or at least to walk out of the theater.

But no one would make a movie that unwatchable, and no one would invest any money in it. For one thing, Haneke keeps all of the actual physical violence offscreen. The threat of it is always in the air in the claustrophobic setting of the film. But when it happens it is quick, and we see only the reactions of others (which is arguably more disturbing).

There’s another way in which Haneke hedges. Though he doesn’t do anything to make us wish ill on these innocent people, neither does he do anything to hold or build our sympathy for them. At some point after we have realized that the torturers are not characters but simple archetypes of evil, it becomes impossible to care about their victims: We dissociate from the whole thing.

Haneke also uses Brechtian tactics like having the torturers address the viewers directly. If he thinks this increases our feeling of complicity with them, though, he’s wrong: It simply makes it easier for us to distance ourselves from what we’re watching.

So watching Funny Games through to the end isn’t impossible to do. It’s just hard to understand why anyone would want to. Haneke says that he was approached by American producers who wanted to buy the rights to remake the film, and that he agreed on the condition that he be allowed to direct it.

It’s sensible of him not to have let this story get into the hands of someone else who would almost certainly have turned it into something along the lines of Saw or Hostel. But can it be that he failed to realize that the film would be marketed anyway to that demographic, and that fans of those kinds of movies are probably going to be the only ones who will see this? Score one for commerce over art.

I suppose there is also an audience who saw the original Funny Games and will want to compare this new version (though I suspect that most viewers, even those who admired the original, will feel that once was enough). Looking at the DVD of the 1997 film right after seeing the new one, I was struck at just how similar they are in every way. This made the differences I did spot stand out, in a film that is already so rigorously controlled that every object and camera placement seems laden with significance: If Haneke was seemingly able to recreate every detail of the earlier film, why did he sometimes not bother to? And is this, as one internet post suggested, Haneke’s sly way of rubbing our noses in the ugliness of the movie even more, by getting some people to watch it repeatedly to analyze such details?

To me, the bizarre thing is that Haneke couldn’t think of any way to refine his remake. Sad to say, violence has come a long way in the past decade. The bar of what is acceptable to show in a film (i.e., what you can get an “R” rating for) has gone through the roof with Saw and Hostel and the like. Even worse, actual torture is no longer an abstraction but a stain on the hands of all Americans, despite the prevarications of our government.

Haneke has his admirers, but if I want to indulge in an icy cinematic exercise from a filmmaker with a superiority complex I’ll take Peter Greenaway any time—at least his films are pleasurable to look at and to listen to.