Monday, October 6, 2008

Benny's Video

Directed by Michael Haneke
Released in 1992.

This movie was fucked up! It came no where close to The Piano Teacher, but still! It opens with this grainy video of someone putting a gun to a pig's head and blowing its brains out. The pig squeals and squirms. The video stops, is rewound and then from right before the gunshot played in slowmo again. This video, we find out is being watched by Benny, a perhaps thirteen-year old German kid, who, it soon becomes apparent, is a total sociopath. He is obsessed with videos and his emotionally detached parents have bought him tons of video equipment. With this, he makes a snuff film by shooting this homeless girl three times with the same gun used to kill the pig.

The movie is not so much gruesome as it is shocking. Haneke himself has described it as a movie about the emotional glaciation of people in highly industrialized nations. Boy! I could not agree more with that definition. It was an extremely disturbing movie not just because of Benny's actions but also because of his parent's reactions when they see his snuff film. As I said: fucked up!

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