Recurring Nightmare.(Michael Haneke's Funny Games)

Be warned. Sitting down to watch the new Michael Haneke movie, "Funny Games," may induce a chronic attack of deja vu, and no wonder. This is a scene-for-scene remake of an old Michael Haneke movie, also called "Funny Games," released here a decade ago. Apart from the continental shift, with America taking on a role previously played by Austria, the two films should be treated as a pair of identical, staring twins. This isn't like Hitchcock having another crack at "The Man Who Knew Too Much," as he did after an interval of twenty-two years, and conjuring a very different result; it isn't even like Gus Van Sant reheating "Psycho" in color, as he did in 1998; it's like Hitchcock himself shooting "Psycho" all over again, in 1970, somewhere off an Autobahn outside Graz.

And so, like shackled prisoners trudging back to the rack and the thumbscrews, we start once more, with an overhead view of a family car pulling a boat on a trailer along rural roads. The family comprises George (Tim Roth), Ann (Naomi Watts), their ten-year-old son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), and their dog--a lolloping golden retriever named Lucky. If there is one lesson we learn from "Funny Games," it is not that malice is rooted deep in our soiled nature, or that capitalist society has made an unhealthy fetish of violence, but simply that, if you want to avoid such unpleasantness, ditch the retriever. Everything that happens to George and Ann could have been avoided with a pair of Dobermans, or an underfed Scottish terrier with a working knowledge of Nietzsche.

George and Ann have a place in the country, on the water, with other desirable residences at a discreet remove. They wave at a set of neighbors as they drive by, but the neighbors seem distracted, busy with a couple of guests. Later, when Ann is in the kitchen, one of those guests, Peter (Brady Corbet), drops in to borrow some eggs. I remember the egg sequence all too well from the earlier "Funny Games"; in a sense, it is the most disturbing scene in the movie, with Peter asking politely, then not so politely, then dropping the eggs and wanting more. The very ordinariness of these moments, and the indefinable point at which they crack and spill into something out of the ordinary, and thence into threat, are a horribly deft introduction to the Haneke method. The rest of the movie is infinitely nastier, yet how much does it truly add to this initial fumble of disquiet?

Peter is soon joined by Paul (Michael Pitt). I was half-expecting a homicidal Mary, just to complete the set, but no joy. Peter and Paul are clad in white, with long shorts and matching gloves: angels with dirty morals, perhaps, or ghostly spoilsports ejected long ago from one of Gatsby's parties, who have prowled the shoreline ever since in search of trouble. (Pitt, especially, makes a cherubic, cherry-lipped villain, to add to his randy innocent in "The Dreamers" and his stoned Kurt Cobain look-alike in "Last Days.") George and Ann try at first to be helpful--always a sign of bourgeois weakness in the world of Haneke--and then ask Paul and Peter to leave. But the young men linger and exasperate, earning a slap on the face from George, at which point, with one retaliatory swing of a golf club, the movie lands in the rough. From here we progress to heavy teasing, torture, homicide, and the spectacle of evil raising its game.

Haneke is obsessed by that spectacle, and by the helpless reflex that compels us to keep watching, even as we cringe at what we see. When the first "Funny Games" came out, in 1997, it felt like a furious rejoinder to "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) and the rest of the pack--to the insistence, among Tarantino and his ilk, on bloodshed as an amusing spectator sport. Where Aristotle's theory of tragedy had relied on catharsis (the climactic purging and mastery of our terror, as we witness overpowering deeds), Haneke seemed to suggest that recent cinema has cheapened such slaking of emotion into a near-pornographic fake: we are crazed and cheered by shuddering events that have no authentic claim upon our feelings. His solution, in "Funny Games," was to teach us a lesson by refusing to offer any such arousal. One problem, however, was that the film itself inched close to the sort of exploitational detail that it was supposed to abhor--a proximity that only gets worse in this later version, which adds a definite carnal kick to the sight of the heroine being forced to strip to her underwear. Beyond this, however, the new movie wears an air of old hat. I would absolutely defend Haneke's right to relaunch his broadside on our voyeuristic vices, but he's not keeping up with the times; he's behind them. Take the musical outrage in the opening ...