Arno Frisch

In Funny Games (1997), Paul speaks quietly while a family is humiliated. Arno Frisch offers no comforting suggestion that this is a man who has simply lost his temper. Alongside Frank Giering, he makes the menace horribly casual, with courtesy continuing after any pretence of decent behaviour has gone. We were horrified by how little effort either man seemed to need to make that humiliation feel routine. The lack of anger makes it worse.

Frisch made his debut in the lead of Michael Haneke's Benny's Video (1992), as a teenager obsessed with video violence. His early roles for Haneke associated him with emotionally detached or violent young men. The move from Benny to Paul kept him within the director's examinations of media and violence. We would not take those two parts as a complete account of what he can do. They do suggest an actor willing to be disliked, and in Funny Games he offers no reassuring explanation for Paul's behaviour.

Frisch and Giering are most effective because they leave the family's suffering in view rather than competing with it. Neither needs a display of rage to establish the threat, and the victims remain painfully human. The reservation lies with Haneke, who repeatedly lectures us about why we are watching when the performances have already made watching difficult. We recommend the film for its dread, but the insistence grows tiresome. Frisch's quiet control has made the point, and there are stretches when we wish the director would let it stand.

His subsequent work extends through Austrian and German films and television, including Niko in Your Name Is Justine (2005) and a recurring part as Sándor Gosztonyi in Babylon Berlin (2017). Those credits are a useful reminder not to reduce an actor to the roles through which we know him best. Start with Funny Games, but take its capacity to spoil a comfortable evening seriously.