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An English-language remake of writer/director Michael Haneke's own 1997 Austrian film, Funny Games is a brutal and gripping horror/thriller with a difference of sorts.

Anna (Watts), George (Roth) and their young son Georgie (Gearhart) arrive at their Long Island summer home looking forward to a quiet vacation: a trip or two on their new sailboat and maybe a couple of rounds of golf with the neighbours.

When a young man wearing white gloves (Pitt) arrives at the house to borrow some eggs Anna finds she is uncomfortable in his presence, despite his feigned politeness and assurance that he is staying with her neighbours. Within minutes the man is joined by his similarly attired friend (Corbet). Anna becomes increasingly uneasy and when George comes up to the house she says he must ask the two to leave. He asks them. They refuse.

Haneke (Cache, The Piano Teacher) sets the scene nicely � a beautiful kitchen, a fridge full of olives and soya milk, the father and son tinkering with their new boat � these people couldn�t be more secure and detached from the worries of the world. The director plays with our expectations of the genre: the camera lingers for a moment on a knife that George and Georgie accidentally leave on their boat � perhaps they will later use this to escape their tormentors? Or perhaps not.

Some have dismissed this remake as pointless. And in that it is a near shot-for-shot remake in the vein of Gus Van Sant�s Psycho (1998), it is. However, Haneke's purpose is not solely artistic, but social. He wishes to challenge the prevalent depiction of violence in the media and says: "When I first envisioned Funny Games in the middle of the 90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivet�, the way American cinema toys with human beings." He adds: "However, because it was a foreign language film and because the actors were not familiar to a US audience, it did not reach its audience."

From this standpoint, re-shooting a film in English for the sole purpose of enabling it to reach a US audience, is justified. However, coming as it does ten years after its predecessor, Funny Games at times lacks the edge the director would like it to have, and it will undoubtedly seem preachy to many. Audiences � even the mainstream American ones that Haneke envisions � have become more familiar with cinema that questions itself. So the psychopaths� asides to camera and other breaks with our expectations of narrative film, for example, are now jolting rather than truly shocking.

Haneke bemoans the fact (few would deny it is a fact) that �In many American films violence is made consumable." Yet he�s caught it a Catch-22 situation: how can you depict and critique the extreme and mindless violence of mainstream American cinema without falling foul of accusations of similar exploitation?

Despite this difficulty, scenes like that in which Watts, with bound feet and hands, hops and stumbles painfully for what seems like minutes just to reach the other side of the sofa, have a punishing reality. When British producers Chris Coen and Hamish McAlpine approached Haneke to suggest the English-language remake the director agreed on the condition that Watts would star in the movie. It was a shrewd condition: Watts gives the film an appeal and weight that it would not otherwise command. Her performance is powerful and convincing while that of Roth, like his American accent, fails to ring true.