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!

One of Mikael Haneke's first feature films makes a great impact on the viewer. I'm writing this after seeing this film for thew second time, 21 years after watching it in a cinema, in a film club setting. Back then we didn't know how many extraordinary films Haneke would be making later on. In that setting, I must say this showed promise of a controversial director with an important message in his films. Haneke wants to make discussions, and don't really care if he is controversial or even disgust people watching his films.Benny is a loner of a 14 year old boy, using so much time in his own room watching violent videos as well as making his own videos with his Video8 camera. His parents are rich, but largely absent from his upbringing, but are more hands on than normal, when they are at home. During a trip to the video store Benny meets a girl of his own age, and invites her home, to show her a video h has made about a pig being shot with a slaughter gun. He shows her the gun he has stolen, and from there the story turns severe.It's not really possible to give a review of this film without telling too much. Still there's no point in spilling the beans. The film has more than one surprise up in the sleeve, and is well suited for discussions in a group or a media class. I can assure you that the viewers will have different views on what they make of this movie. Why is Benny doing this? Is this likely or even at all realistic? Why do they do the things they do? Whta would you have done in the same situation? Who's to blame? Does it provoke you? Are we watching a sociopath in the making? Why did Haneke make this film?As always in Haneke's films, the actors are brilliant in their play, though it's easy to criticize the ideas if you don't like them. Arno Frisch is brilliantly portraying young Benny, as a boy who has lost his way due to some reason or another.After viewing this film the first time, back in 1993, we had one of the greatest discussions I ever experienced after a film. We always went to a café side-by-side to the cinema after the film club showings, and this film made us having a major discussion. So I never forgot this film, and Haneke, or Austrian films for that matter. I must say this film made an immensely impact on me due to this. Watching it again so many years later, reminds me of what I really remember of the film, which is almost half. When you remember so much of it, it's no doubt a great film. Not flawless, but important as well as remarkable.This can't be recommended to the faint hearted, nor due to the content, the violence or the moral. You'll better stay away if you are easily disgusted or offended.

The world though Benny's video camera is a disjointed, skewed and dangerous one. Played back through his VCR, along with the countless video nasties he seems to be able to rent without his age (14) being questioned from his local video rental store, that distortion is multiplied indefinitely.At times, this film is repulsive and sickening, as we start with a pig that the family want to slaughter for meat is filmed having a bolt shot through its head. "It's only a pig", Benny says, as he rewinds, again and again and repeats the animal's death and subsequent squirming in slo-mo.His parents are involved in the travel business and go away whilst Benny stays at home with all his high-tech gizmos, all that his parents had bought for him, presumably to make him happy. Getting a girl into this ivory tower of his, he plays her the pig vid and then shows the instrument used on the animal that he had stolen for a souvenir. In a game of dare, she gets shot with it and this is where it all goes horribly strange and ugly. Most folks - all folks, actually - would phone for an ambulance. He doesn't, he re-loads it with bolts and does so again and again. We see a TV with this being filmed, with only the periphery showing. He then films himself streaking her blood on his naked body.I hope that this hasn't spoiled things too much but the main thrust of the film is the aftermath of all this. Parents come home, Benny gets a skinhead haircut and then replays the vids of the "accident" over and again, just when the parents are going past the open door of his room.What we make of Haneke's matter of fact portrayal of the parents colluding to and discussing what to do with her body is one of open debate. Their emotionless disdain for what has happened appals, and so it should. Benny and his mother then go on holiday to the Red Sea, where Benny films everything.The films pans out to its end matter-of-factly with the family going off to bury the girl's body and Haneke makes a bold and sweeping statement simply by having us watching them through the bank of monitors that show what all the surveillance cameras dotted about the house show.Though Benny's Video was made exactly 20 years ago, it still is as important and pertinent now as it was then. Uncompromising and powerful, if largely unlikeable.I watched this as part of the Michael Haneke 10 DVD anthology.

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