Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
When Ann, husband George, and son Georgie arrive at their holiday home they are visited by a pair of polite and seemingly pleasant young men. Armed with deceptively sweet smiles and some golf clubs, they proceed to terrorize and torture the tight-knit clan, giving them until the next day to survive.
Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot American remake of his own 1997 Austrian film is a deliberately provocative meta-horror exercise that earns high marks for novelty — not despite being a remake but because the conceit of remaking it for a Hollywood audience is itself the point, weaponizing genre conventions against the viewer. The fourth-wall breaks (Naomi Watts rewinding time, Michael Pitt's winking at the camera) are genuinely unsettling and conceptually bold. Acting is a standout: Naomi Watts delivers a raw, convincing performance of sustained dread, while Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet are icily effective as the tormentors. The plot is intentionally thin and punishing by design — Haneke refuses catharsis or conventional thriller mechanics — which is philosophically coherent but still narratively sparse. Cinematography is competent and cold but not especially distinguished. The ending is deliberately anticlimactic and thesis-driven (the cycle simply restarts), which is intellectually consistent but emotionally frustrating in a way that feels more punishing than enlightening on repeat viewing.