Benny's Video (1992)
Directed by Michael Haneke
A 14-year-old video enthusiast obsessed with violent films decides to make one of his own and show it to his parents, with tragic results.
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What critics compared Benny's Video to
(He had starred in Haneke's previous Benny's Video, and it might have colored my response to Funny Games if I had seen that film previously, giving me context for the actor's performance.)
That's the point: Haneke's uber violence is a critique of uber violence on screen, as was his cheerless and disturbing Benny's Video, made in 1992.
The suffering of the mother, father, and child is hideously realistic, and our thoughts turn not to the picture’s artifice but to the line of cinematic killers who videotape their atrocities, among them the protagonists of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Haneke’s own Benny’s Video?in which a media-deadened 14-year-old boy (played by Arno Frisch, who grew up to be one of the home invaders in the original Funny Games) repeatedly watches a tape of a pig being slaughtered, then tries out the pig-killing gun on an adolescent girl in a scene that would appall even No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.
The director has explored societal issues before in such films as "Funny Games," "Code Unknown" and "The Time of the Wolf," and he has also used video as a psychological tool in the early "Benny's Video," but never before has he so skillfully made a statement.
In Benny's Video, a teenage boy lures a young girl into his family's apartment and kills her with a stun gun.
As in Haneke's earlier "Benny's Video" and (less directly) "The Seventh Continent," the target here is not only contemporary materialism and self-satisfaction, but also modern media--symbolized by a mobile phone that refuses to function dependably, and brought directly into the narrative by a few surprising moments (and one that's downright astonishing) when a character manipulates the action (and us in the audience) as a self-aware part of the fiction.
Writer-director Michael Haneke (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) communicates this thesis very clearly, mostly through one of the two killers, Paul (who refers to himself and the other k iller as Paul and Peter, or Tom and Jerry, or Beavis and Butt-head).
Alas, Haneke's aesthetic already begins to seem bullying in his follow-up, the notorious film-fest shocker Benny's Video (1992), in which the 14-year-old latchkey kid of the title, numbed by countless hours of TV violence, murders a casual acquaintance without remorse, literally leaving his well-off parents to clean up the mess.