It almost seems like a reverse Funny Games, where, instead of playing its concept goofily yet ratcheting up the monstrosity to such terrible levels that it makes you (or is meant to make you) ashamed to enjoy stuff like this, it instead plays the most retarded concept imaginable straight, forcing a comparison to other, probably equally if less obviously goofy, films to trigger the shame reaction.
Was that what
Funny Games was all about?
I was under the impression that
Funny Games was about subverting and reversing the viewer's expectations. The conventions of the genre are overturned, there are no last-minute escapes, the 'final girl' does not survive, the guilty are not punished, and the social order is not restored, even temporarily.
Other movies have done this as well, of course. But what separates
Funny Games from, say,
The Strangers are its metanarrative elements. At least one of the home invaders is aware that he's a character in a movie.
Paradoxically, by giving this character miraculous powers within the world of the film--by making him the cinematic equivalent of a lucid dreamer--the film itself winds up being more true-to-life than most films in the genre. And it pointedly reminds you that any enjoyment you derive from watching such movies arises from the unreal and fictional elements therein.
It also makes a rather chilling statement about the nature of social order, justice, and morality: that these are all just an illusion, like the world of cinema--an anti-Matrix, if you will. The one home invader has woken up from this enchanted sleep--but instead of using his god-like powers for good, like Neo in
The Matrix, he uses them for evil. Because it amuses him to do so, and because he can.
I find it difficult to believe that
The Human Centipede offers anything nearly as thoughtful as
Funny Games.
