10 Moments That Literally Stopped Movies
3. Hitting The Rewind Button - Funny Games
Michael Haneke's Funny Games - both the original 1997 Austrian film and his own Hollywood remake a decade later - feature an infamous sequence which not only stops the film dead in its tracks, but quite literally rewinds it and gives one character a do-over.
Funny Games is effectively Haneke's attempt to poke savage fun at both the conventions of the home invasion thriller as a piece of entertainment, and our own complicity in paying to watch people be tortured, with the expectation that the "heroes" will eventually turn the tables and triumph.
Yet as anyone who's seen the film knows, no such cathartic happy ending lies in wait for the families in either film, as is alluded to earlier on when the mother character (Naomi Watts in the remake) grabs a shotgun and kills one of the two young invaders.
At this point, the other attacker (Michael Pitt in the remake) grabs a remote control and hits the rewind button, causing the movie itself to scrub backwards a few seconds so that, this time, he can grab the shotgun before the mother does.
The entire movie is an exercise in smashing the fourth wall to pieces, but never does it more aggressively upend the trajectory of the narrative itself than when giving one of the villains a second chance to enact his plan.