I'M YOUR TOY: One of Funny Games' well-groomed psychopaths shows that torture is child's play.

As the new DVDs of his first four features demonstrate, Haneke has been putting audiences uncomfortably face to face with such questions since the very beginning. In Benny's Video (1992), a teenage boy obsessed with horror movies and video equipment passionlessly murders a young girl while the camera looks on unblinking, while Funny Games (1997) follows an even more horrific crime with an unbroken, practically unending shot, in which the surviving victims of a horrific home invasion limp to their feet and wail out their grief. These are things no sane person would wish to see, and yet it's impossible to tear yourself away.

If Haneke can't be said to make horror movies, it's only because he rigorously rids his movies of the escape valves that make butchery easy to watch; there's no self-referential humor, little or no musical score, and none of the Pavlovian editing that pushes our reponses this way and that. Make no mistake: Haneke wants to manipulate our emotions. He just doesn't want to get caught doing it.

The Seventh Continent (1989), Haneke's first theatrical feature, is a formidable, assured and chilling depiction of middle-class anomie. The director's desire to alienate audience from subject couldn't be more plain: It's nearly 10 minutes before we get the first identifiable glimpse of any of the characters' faces. Instead, Haneke carves disassociated tableaux from their daily routine: hands working a coffeemaker or cereal spilling into a bowl. The effect is at once mundane and unbearably intense, an unbroken rhythm that becomes dizzyingly uncomfortable. (Sustained rhythm is critical to Haneke's art, so if you're watching these at home, I suggest turning off the phone and hiding the remote.) Moving forward a year, Haneke repeats the same events, and repeats them again, until the family's explosive response to their circle of tedium starts to seem like a natural conclusion.

Boredom produces equally violent results in Benny's Video, in which a teenage boy murders a young girl with a pig-killing gun because he wants "to see what it feels like." Again, Haneke keeps his distance. The central murder is filmed at a double remove, with a stationary camera focused on a video monitor, although Haneke encourages us to use our imagination. Benny confidently proclaims that movie violence is only "ketchup and plastic," but Haneke's largely bloodless approach (at least, until after the fact) is far more wrenching.

Still, the worst is yet to come. Funny Games is utterly brutal and entirely unnerving, the story of a family (as always, the statutory minimum of two parents and a single child) are held hostage by two soft-spoken, well-kept psychopaths (one of whom played the young murderer in Benny's Video). The two young men, who go by the names of various pop culture duos (Beavis and Butt-head, Tom and Jerry) insinuate their way into the family's lakefront house, and promptly shatter the father's leg with a golf club. What follows is nearly an hour of excruciating physical and psychological torture, culminating in the most devastating act in any of Haneke's films.

Unfortunately, Haneke squanders the blistering intensity of the movie's climax on a protracted final act. The killers start to address the audience, and the movie, which up to now has been Haneke's most conventionally suspenseful, consumes itself in a fit of self-referential smugness. The movie actively starts to attack its audience, as if to say, "What kind of asshole is still watching this thing?" Haneke himself seems to think there's something wrong with people who don't walk out. "Those who watch this movie until the end are the ones who need it," he says in an interview on the DVD.

The trouble with Haneke is that as biting (or, at least, as vicious) as his critiques of bourgeois complacency can be, he rarely turns that criticism on himself. There's no "we" in his movies, and when he tries to force one, as in the collective patchwork 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the result is an abstract jigsaw puzzle whose pieces never fit together. Haneke is happy to exploit his audience's fascination with violence, and its desire to rationalize compulsive behavior, but he rarely seems to confront his own longings. It's why he could so blithely dismiss the question of who sent Caché's mysterious videotapes, leaving only an easy-to-miss hint that poses more questions than it answers. To him, it's all a game, and any sucker who plays deserves what he gets.