As sadistic and nihilistic as it is, "Funny Games" is also masterfully made; Haneke plays the audience and its expectations like a master fiddler (albeit a merciless one). Tim Roth and Naomi Watts prove their skill by vivifying their characters’ limited emotional scale; Watts brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person. Meanwhile, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet do solid jobs playing the roles assigned to them as sickening junior psychos.

Despite its stellar cast, Funny Games is bound to fail commercially; even the original was seen mostly by people in the global arthouse circuit. Still, one thing you can say about Edgy auteur Michael Haneke's brutal thriller, is that it's an unpleasant, unsettling, cruelly manipulative and finally hateful experience, but an experience nonetheless. Don't say you weren't warned.