Michael Haneke isn’t happy with you. The Austrian director says you’ve been watching too many dumb violent movies. All that Tarantino and “Hostel 2.”

He wants you to know how bad you are. He says you need to be taught a lesson. How does he propose to do that? With an even dumber violent movie.

“Funny Games” is Haneke’s painstaking recreation of his own 1997 Austrian film of the same name. An exercise in depravity, the latter was meant to shame or repel Hollywood audiences out of their thirst for violence by holding up a mirror to their own sadistic yearnings. Much to Haneke’s chagrin, nobody looked in the mirror. The film was in German, and strangely enough, Hollywood audiences simply weren’t in the mood for artsy-fartsy, finger-wagging European films that lectured them about how mindless and desensitized they’d all become. They were busy that year watching teenagers getting hacked to death in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”

So now comes Haneke’s Hollywood version, nearly a shot-for-shot remake. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth star as the central couple, who go out to their vacation home with their son one fine summer. Michael Pitt and Brady Colbert play the two sickos who drop by to ruin their day. A brutal night of physical and emotional torture follows for the family, all in the name of good old-fashioned “entertainment,” and you’re invited along for the stomach-churning ride because you can’t get enough of the stuff.

Throughout the abuse, Haneke throws in plenty of heavy-handed references to our supposed complicity and active participation in the whole thing, just to remind us there’s a fundamental message involved here and it’s not for his own enjoyment. But is it not? Haneke almost reminds one of a school principal who froths at the mouth a little too heavily while giving a schoolboy a good thrashing, or a priest who delights a little too much in recounting the precise details of a sinner’s transgressions. Whatever Haneke’s genuine feelings while making it, the film is definitely as repulsive, perverse and above all artless as the original. Wim Wenders and countless others famously walked out on the latter at Cannes, and doubtless many will do the same this time around. Indeed, I dare say anyone who sits all the way through is probably sick in the head. Unless of course you’re reviewing it.

2 Stars by John Robertson.

Directed by Michael Haneke. Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt. Category IIB, 111 mins.