Benny's Video (1992)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The acting in this movie is really good.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Basically, I have started to get sick of Michael Haneke's torture. He is one of the most ruthless director as he only creates characters without sentiments. The Benny here is so hateful and I just can't help cursing him while I am watching the film. I get the point. It's a critique of bourgeois life. Oh my. But still. Haneke, get a life!

I don't find the movie particularly interesting. There's a consensus among the viewers that Benny's actions are influenced by his lifestyle and media violence addiction. Whether this was Haneke's idea or not the message is simply wrong.What is overlooked is that Benny is a typical psychopath. In real life it'd be much harder to make a diagnosis but for fictional characters approximations are good enough. The portrayal isn't completely accurate but many of the common signs are there: shallow affect, the total lack of empathy, conscience and remorse, insidiousness, impulsiveness, irresponsibility, casual use of violence, etc. Anyone who wants to learn more should read "Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us" by Robert D. Hare, one of the leading experts in the field.Long story short: Benny's media preferences are the extension of his pathological personality not the other way around. Psychopaths existed long before Hollywood and their actions are not dictated by something they saw in a film somewhere.

I was truly hoping that this fascinatingly disturbing story would come to fruition in film, but this did not live up to my expectations. Besides a few exciting parts, the film quickly became boring to watch and did not have much movement. The parents' reaction to their son's actions was largely unbelievable at times and I think undermined the entire purpose of the movie. What parent remains completely calm when they see their son committing murder? Did the father really chop up the girl into small pieces to shove her down the drain? Was this seriously their brightest idea? With a plot line so horrific, you would think there would be a lot of emotion involved, but with regards to maybe one or two scenes, it was nothing but blank expressions and a sense of carelessness. I wanted more from this film, but did not receive.I do think this can serve as an exaggerated warning message to parents out there who do not have quality involvement with their children.

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