Two young men, dressed all in white and wearing white gloves, arrive on the doorstep of a vacationing family. Their request is simple. Their manner exceedingly polite, but strangely forceful. What follows is one of the most excruciating series of events you’ll see on a theater screen this year. The worst physical actions take place off screen, but the mental battery demands endurance in a way that the Saw and Hostel films only pretend to. It also rewards the experience with performances and craft that soar beyond genre.

But that’s only part of the story. I’ll just grab the remote and rewind… 

In 1997 Michael Haneke made the harrowing Funny Games. Constructed similarly to movies like Last House on the Left, it wasn't a horror film but a method of questioning violence in cinema, creative intentions, the entire bourgeoisie or all of the former, depending on your point of view. It was also a gut-wrenching piece of performance and a masterfully understated directorial effort with a blankly overt message.

If all the meta-discussion seems like too much overhead, just know this: Funny Games is a much more frightening piece of film than all the movies it seeks to criticize, making it finally the biggest contradiction in Haneke's oeuvre.

Now, for reasons that will probably never be apparent to most of us, Haneke has crafted a shot for shot remake of his own film. Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbett and Devon Gearhart replace the five original actors, but the sets, music, titles and script are functionally identical. Nothing is neutered or changed. If you've seen the original you can probably stop reading after the next paragraph.

Roth and Watts are phenomenal; Watts in particular displays more of her penchant for on-screen masochism as she superbly portrays a victim of torture. I slightly prefer original actors Arno Frisch and Frank Giering over their American counterparts Pitt and Corbett, but only because Frisch and Giering, to me, have a better carriage for the part. There's no deficiency in Pitt and Corbett's performances. And the question between Gearhart and original actor Stefan Clapczynski is a toss-up; both are quite good.

Now that we're caught up…

George (Roth), Ann (Watts) and their son George Jr. (Gearhart) arrive at their summer home. The setting is obviously wealthy, probably the Hamptons. They briefly chat with their neighbors, who are in the company of two well-dressed young men and behaving oddly. Soon the two young men, Peter (Pitt) and Paul (Corbett), arrive at George and Ann’s house, ostensibly to borrow some eggs.

The film strikes an uneasy tone from frame one. The family drives towards their fate as the opening credits roll. In the car they play a guessing game with opera CDs. But Haneke lays screamingly violent music (Naked City’s 'Bonehead') over their happy laughter. There's no hiding the movie's intentions, no limp move to create a semblance of normalcy.

Once Peter and Paul arrive on the doorstep, characters and audience alike begin to drown in tension. We’re like cats in a sack going over the rail into a river. This celluloid has all the shock of exploitation executed with the skill of one of the world’s most interesting filmmakers. The first two acts are utterly horrific as the pair torment George and his family, seemingly without reason. Simple psychological intimidation is their first weapon; they call each other by different names (Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry, Beavis and Butthead) to keep the family off balance and insist on polite conversation, even during and after physical assaults.

Haneke watches everything with a cruelly dispassionate eye. His camera rarely moves, and never blinks as George and Ann crumble. He does not resort to screeching music or loud shock sound editing. In many ways the movie is as mannered and refined as Peter and Paul. You feel as if Haneke might wear white gloves while directing it. And while we’re not asked to watch most of the movie’s many acts of violence, of which only one occurs on-screen, we are asked whether we’d like to see more.

For Funny Games has more up its sleeve than outré shock or horror shtick. Michael Haneke wants to know why we watch movies like this, and he’s forthright in asking the question. So while, yes, this is arguably art-house torture porn, it doesn’t exist simply to leech a few dollars away from audiences that would never see Saw. But while it is inarguably a high-minded movie, it is also awfully good at the basics of being a thriller. I cannot imagine seeing a movie that chills and gets under my skin more swiftly and with more determined, cunning power any time soon.   

This is the place where I’m going to put the score, but there are other things I’d like to talk about that could spoil the movie for some. They’re on page two. Bear with me. I'll be up in a few minutes.

9 out of 10

(Sorry for the delay on page two, folks. I'd finished the draft and was proofing it last night when the now-famous Atlanta tornado hit my house. We very luckily suffered almost no damage, but the draft is locked in my desktop PC and my neighborhood remains without power 26 hours later.)