Call me crazy but I never would've pegged Michael Haneke as a director likely to remake any film, never mind one of his own. But despite the huge amount of international success the man has had he's gone and done just that, putting together a shot for shot remake of his breakthrough film Funny Games.

Now, I can't imagine that spending months of your life trying to recreate something you yourself had done years earlier - the only significant difference is the language spoken - would be a real fun time. Difficult, yes. Frustrating, yes. But fun? Not so much. And given that the only other time I can recall someone doing this in recent years was Gus Van Sant's disastrous Psycho remake I can't really imagine what Haneke was thinking going into this unless, just maybe, he really thought a bigger audience needed to hear what he had to say the first time round and realized - absolutely correctly - that American audiences just don't give a damn about anything not in English. And so - Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt in tow - he's doing it all again.

Watts and Roth are Anna and George, an outwardly perfect couple taking their son for a quiet vacation at the family "cottage" - a lavish home in a gated community exclusively for the ridiculously wealthy. They seem to have it all including, unfortunately, a pair of eerily polite young men in white shirts and gloves with a strange insistence that they be given eggs. Yes, it's home invasion time, power taken from the family effortlessly by a pair of youth, utterly vacant of any sort of real emotion, who simply intend to degrade, demean, torment and eventually kill the trio in a series of games designed purely for their own entertainment.

Could be the plot of the next Hostel  except Haneke's a whole lot smarter than that - perhaps too smart for his own good, in this case - and has something entirely different in mind. It's hard to talk about where the film goes once you get past the setup without dropping simply massive spoilers so let it simply be said that it is far less about anything involving the characters on screen and far more about your involvement as an audience.

Which would be a good thing - nothing wrong with throwing an audience's own tastes back in their faces from time to time and forcing them to think about why they enjoy what they enjoy - if not for the fact that the way Haneke does it pretty much immediately cuts the audience off from any sort of emotional connection to what's happening on screen, wasting one stellar performance from Watts in the process.  Haneke's always been a very formal, very cerebral sort of film maker and his greatest strength is also his big weakness here. For this sort of thing to really work it needs to be something that you feel - you should walk out of the theater feeling beaten up - but this is mostly one that you think about. It's interesting more than it is affecting and there's pretty much no chance in hell that the audience that most needs to see it will either enter the theater or care about what they experience there if they do.

The curious among you can find the red-band version of the trailer here and a comparison of the initial remake trailer to the trailer for the original version of the film here.