People are voting emotionally.

Memorable, crazy movie

Good concept, poorly executed.

An Exercise In Nonsense

Benny has everything! A wealthy family that gives him a great life, money to spend with his friends at McDonalds, more money so that he can rent the videos he wants at the videostore; everything constitutes for Benny being a good teenager, or a good person. But he also has a darker side: a strange fascination for death that seems to increase in his soul, to later be exteriorized in his body, after filming a horrific execution of a pig (showed right in the opening and repeated one more time). That image leads to his first real crime, the murder of a young girl randomly picked on the street, who is brutally murdered by him. Reason: Out of curiosity. In "Benny's Video" director Michael Haneke argues about our hunger for violence, a hunger that seem to be everywhere, it follows us all the time and we can't deny our impression with it (that's why violent films are more popular than artistic films). It's present in the films Benny rents, on the news he watches with his parents, everywhere. Who can blame the boy? His morbid desire had to be fulfilled, he needed to know if killing someone is a unimpressive experience than the one he has while watching his films or repeatedly watching the pig's death, first in the usual speed, than in slow motion. Here's a boy who recurred to violence simply because no one was around (mother and father were traveling) and nothing could stop him at the moment. And we could say that he could go on killing more people given the fact his parents haven't turned him to the police but he saw that what he did was too much.Played by an always impressive Arno Frisch (way before of making of us his accomplices with his disturbing and violent experiences in "Funny Games"), Benny is quite a figure and his deadly obsessions and the murder makes Macaulay Culkin's pranks in "The Good Son" something funny. In all of his amazing stoicism, the killing of a girl was acceptable but seeing what his parents did, covering up for him and getting rid of the corpse was way worst and that he couldn't tolerate (that explains the ending, in part). And the parents (played by Ulrich Mühe, ironically he would play the victim of Frisch in "Funny Games" and Angela Winkler) are even hard to imagine, not in the sense of they saying they love their son (when they don't) but this protection and their cold reaction on the fact he murdered someone (the mother even burst in laughter right after Benny's confession). Not a single emotion appears right after that, except when they travel to Egypt (while the father arranges a way to disappear with the girl's body) the mother shows some reaction by crying but even that crying seems so doubtful, we can't know for sure why she's doing that.Haneke impresses us by showing how Benny committed the crime but without appealing to the Hollywood formula of gore, yet it is a disturbing moment. He puts a camera filming a part of the house, we can only hear what's happening in the other room, the girl screams, the sound of the gun (a captive bolt pistol, same thing used by Anton Chigurh in a more well known film) being used. It's difficult to not be shocked or feel frozen after that. More impressive than this moment only the first (and real) image of the film, already mentioned, something quite unnecessary on a film that wants to make a criticism over violence but opens this same film to the shock of many viewers. How many continued to watch after the pig's execution? If you can't deal with it, just fast forward these 40 seconds, and continue to watch the film, the discussions made by "Benny's Video" are many, all of them welcome and relevant.I have some issues with the film in terms of its structure but I can't understand all this complain about the film being slow. It's slow paced but it's not that bad. The way Haneke used slowness at some points and in some of the three acts that was unnerving. The first act deals with the controversial and most interesting part of the film, the one in which we keep asking ourselves 'what comes next?'. The trip to Egypt was boring, it often breaks the pace of the movie, and when it's not doing this it gets worse when it seems to take us out of the movie, it seems a different film with nowhere to go and nothing to say. But when we reach the third act, back in Sweden, it comes some good surprises; then, finally leaves us with some doubts about the ending. Brutal in its reality, shocking in its content but subtle in its presentation, this is an uncomfortable and unsettling film that doesn't exist to inspire more Benny's out there, in case some detractors might think that films like this are responsible for violence in the world. It's there to open our eyes to a wider, depressive and sad reality that could be happening close to you and you wouldn't know. 9/10

Benny, an Austrian teenager likes to sit in his darkened room and watch videos. Not only that but he prefers total saturation, when he's not watching TV, it's always on in the background, along with heavy metal. Benny has two expressions, absorption, and the nonchalant mask he puts on to manipulate people. It appears his favourite video is one he took himself of a pig being slaughtered during a family holiday. When the pig gets it with the airgun po-faced Benny rewinds.It was an unnerving film for me to watch simply because there was I in a darkened room watching a TV screen surrounded by bookshelf after bookshelf of videos, watching Benny in exactly the same surroundings. Furthermore Benny was pretty much the same age as I was back in 1992. I even had nostalgia for the packaging at the local MacDonalds, nine chicken McNuggets in a box with woven print! Haneke takes forensic shots of these fast food items, just like his static shots of the father taking apart the telephone in The Seventh Continent.Benny it seems is often left alone on the weekends, lord knows what I would have got up to if I'd been left at home with a few bills from mum and dad's wallet! (I knew a boy at school who was in that situation and ended up becoming the school drug dealer). Benny likes getting videos from the local video store a lot, this also was my teenage preoccupation. The more violent and crazy the better! We're left in no doubt as to his character, at choir practice all the angelic boys sing full-throated and yet are passing notes and pills behind their backs in a relay. Superbly subversive shooting!Benny has got bored with anything other than video and even has a very creepy setup where he draws blackout blinds on all the living room windows, the image from outside is then relayed through a video camera peeping out, to a television set just in front of the window! Here we have the heart of voyeurism, one-way engagement.It's clear things are not going to go well, as we are in the world of Michael Haneke, and in a humour-free universe. Benny lures a young girl home from the video store where he proceeds to video her death at his hands. He uses the airgun from his favourite porcine video. He seems initially perturbed after the murder, but we also see him stop to have a glass of milk, and also in the evening he arranges to go out partying and to copy his friend's homework.World cinema lovers will be pleased to see Ulrich Muhe (recently from The Lives of Others) as the father. At length, Benny has to tell his parents what he has done as the girl's corpse has been in a cupboard in their flat for two days. It's at this point where we see how purblind the parents are. The living room is decorated in yet more image saturation, Magritte, Warhol, Liechtenstein, Botticelli, all collaged into a morass of vacant imagery and valuelessness. The father's initial thoughts include the impact of the murder on Benny's CV. Truly this piece of paper represents the sum of one's existence in this warped universe! The parent's decide to cover the murder up, and Benny and his mother go for a holiday in the middle east.The part in the middle east is very pretty, we see all sorts of shots of marketplaces, ancient mud-built houses, hieroglyphics, monuments. It's clear though that this is again yet more vacant image saturation, however beautiful, the hieroglyphics meaningless to Benny and his mother who look on in their culturally imperialistic parade around Egpyt, Tunisia and beyond. Another reviewer has pointed to the remorseless contemptibility of this exercise, however I think that both Benny and his mother were experiencing remorse (ie. Benny has his head shaved, the mother cries on her hotel bed), in however constipated a manner.Benny almost inexplicably decides on his return home to Austria to shop his parents to the police, having recorded their post-discovery conversation. Is this Haneke signalling just desserts, indicating that if you breed vipers they will eat you? Is Benny manipulatively shopping his parents in the hope of clemency, or has he genuinely had a pang of conscience and proffered his parents to justice? At the end we are left with some ambivalences but also a clear indication of the importance of parenting, and the toxicity of image: 24/7 news flow of Balkan conflict, RoboCop, advertising and modern art serves to gloopify the brain! A slight pity that Haneke went down the Funny Games dead ends after this, with only Cache as a return to form. This film urges one to self-examine, and is therefore, priceless.10/10

Benny's Video was the fifth Haneke's creation I watched after "The piano teacher", "Funny games", "The hour of the wolf" and "Cache". It is strong,allegorical,cynical and plain.With an actor's expression or line it offers you many thoughts and directions.This movie made me understand why Haneke refuses to comment on the meaning of his films.You have to try and play his game.To decode his pictures and words which isn't so hard, trust me.The ending is also powerful and summarizes the whole picture.It was one of the best films I have ever seen.It is amazingly coordinated with our times even though it was filmed about 15 years ago. You should definitely try to find it!

Anyone that's seen any of Haneke's work knows that he typically leans towards confrontational and controversial subject matter, and BENNY'S VIDEO is no different. This film seems to strike people differently and on many different levels, as much of Haneke's work does. I must say, that it is not quite what I was expecting based on what I had read about it, and can honestly say I was slightly disappointed as I was expecting an extremely dark and nihilistic film (and that's not quite what I got...) - but it is still a good film that will be of interest to those that "enjoy" more thought provoking and "dark" cinema...Benny is a relatively average teenager, except for his penchant for watching and re-watching a homemade tape of the slaughter of a pig. He seems to be a relatively sociable child as he has friends that he hangs out with and doesn't seem to be particularly shy or reserved. He does rent a lot of videos and has a bunch of video equipment in his room - but this seems to be more of a serious hobby than an actual "obsession" for Benny. One day, he meets a girl around the same age outside the video store and invites her over to his family's apartment. His mother and father are out of town, so Benny hangs out with her, makes her some food, and shows her his pig-slaughter tape. When an "accident" in the apartment (which is inadvertently caught on Benny's video-camera)leaves the girl dead - Benny is at a loss for how to handle the situation - and decides to play the tape back for his parents to try to find a resolution to the situation. Benny's mother and father then have a discussion as to how to handle the problem, and come up with a "solution" that may turn out to either save or destroy their family...Again, BENNY'S VIDEO didn't turn out to be quite the film that I expected it to be. From what I had read, I thought that Benny (played by the same smarmy little bastard that played Paul in Haneke's FUNNY GAMES - though a few years younger in this film) was going to be some video-obsessed, anti-social nerd and that his family would be some sort of borderline-abusive emotional automatons - but that's really not the case here. What "I" saw, was a relatively normal (if somewhat "emotionally-absent") family that were thrust into an extremely unpleasant, yet believable situation. I think that the conversation that Benny's mother and father had after being made aware of the death of the girl held a lot of "truth" as to what lengths people will go to to protect themselves and their family, and Haneke's film shows one family's path in protecting themselves. I won't say that I necessarily agree or disagree with the decision that Benny's parents made - but I can understand them "covering" for him as much as I could understand if they had turned him in.Technically, the film is good on all ends - the acting is all believable and strong, and the cinematography is appropriately "cold" and somewhat voyeuristic (as is necessary given the subject-matter). My main gripe was with Benny's "change of heart" at the end - I feel personally that the film would have been stronger had the family just gotten on with their lives as though nothing happened. I feel this would have been even more "chilling", but apparently Haneke thought differently. Like FUNNY GAMES, I didn't find BENNY'S VIDEO particularly "disturbing" like many others apparently do - I found it to be a strong portrayal of cause-and-effect, actions-and-consequences, and a "case-study" of one family dealing with an "unfixable" situation. Personally, I found FUNNY GAMES to revel more in it's "mean-spiritedness", where as BENNY'S VIDEO was a much more "realistic" film. I can say that I'm a relative fan of Haneke's work - but I guess I just don't find his films as "shocking" and "disturbing" as others do - I find them to be well crafted stories that delve into the "darker" side of life...8/10