Funny Games
The meta interpretation about the audience is alluring, considering all the aside glances and the rewind bit, but I prefer a Watsonian interpretation where the father is the most weaksauce human ever lived. A complete wet noodle, as useful as a marzipan dildo.
Seriously, the wife explicitly tell him to his face, eyes marred with tears, to kick those louts out, and he is all hot and bothered about politeness and shit. The middle class existence produces an absolute spineless creature.
It’s more powerful when criticises all sex and violence on TV without being titillating (except the woman’s sweater at the end, what is that?). It’s almost all implied and offscreen, it’s not schlock, we get some audio-based torture at best.
The psychopaths are always polite, don’t raise their voices, always on the down low. They even bait the family with some banter between them, so they have some hope the fatter guy snap and attack the leader, but it might as well be part of the ruse!
From what we see of the other family in the end, the woman is much more pro-active, and the husband is the wet noodle, so the sequel might not go as well, they might as well be taken down a notch.
The father is played by the guy from The Lives of Others, and the mother by his actual wife. Oof, why do artists do this to themselves? I bet they never went on vacations to a lakehouse ever again.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.