Impossible not to compare Funny Games with, for example, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, as Tarja Laine did on her interesting but debatable essay about this film, link here.

The three movies have, in fact, lots of similarities, specially because they share the same motivation to criticize violence. Aesthetically, however, we have three very different films. Whilst Natural Born Killers makes you - ironically! - empathises with two sociopaths in order to use the media gun against itself and in Clockwork Orange violence is depicted more like a natural behavior encouraged by the stupidness of the State, in Haneke's masterful film you'll see violence in a more realistic way, with raw colors and exhilarating empathy with the victims.

Funny Games has, thus, a more emotional involvement with the audience, but intellectually we don't have much clues about what is going on and there is no explanation for the deliberate violence we see in the screen. Therefore, in Haneke's film the consequences of violence are more important than the roots of it. The director's emotional appeal has a strong characteristic to make the audience feels completely terrified by the existence of such a violence but it sadly fails on depict how this should be handled. If there is such an answer...