''Benny's Video'' is a 1992
psychological horror
Psychological horror is a genre, subgenre of horror fiction, horror and psychological fiction with a particular focus on mental, emotional, and Mental state, psychological states to frighten, disturb, or unsettle its audience. The subgenre freque ...
film directed by
Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke (; born 23 March 1942) is an Austrian film director and screenwriter. His work often examines social issues and depicts the feelings of estrangement experienced by individuals in modern society. Haneke has made films in French, Ge ...
and starring
Arno Frisch,
Angela Winkler, and
Ulrich Mühe. Set in
Vienna
Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...
, it centers on Benny, a teenager who views much of his life as distilled through video images, and his well-to-do parents Anna and Georg, who enable Benny's focus on video cameras and images. The film won the
FIPRESCI
The International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI, short for ''Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique'') is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the wor ...
Award at the 1993
European Film Awards
The European Film Awards (or European Film Academy Awards) have been presented annually since 1988 by the European Film Academy to recognize excellence in European cinematic achievements. The awards are given in 19 categories, of which the mos ...
.
Plot
Teenage Benny is obsessed with film recordings and cameras. His emotionally absent parents, Georg and Anna, provide him with televisions, cassette players, and recording devices to encourage their son's hobby, seemingly unaware of his fascination with filmed violence. Benny repeatedly views a
home video
Home video is recorded media sold or Video rental shop, rented for home viewing. The term originates from the VHS and Betamax era, when the predominant medium was videotapes, but has carried over to optical disc formats such as DVD and Blu-ray. ...
he shot on a European farm, which captures the slaughter of a pig with a
captive bolt pistol
A captive bolt pistol (also known as a captive bolt gun, a cattle gun, a stunbolt gun, a bolt gun, a stun gun and a stunner) is a device used for the stunning of animals prior to slaughter.
A captive bolt pistol is intended to deliver a single ...
.
A party centered on a game called
Pilot and Passengers is broken up by Georg and Anna when they return home. Eva, their daughter who lives separately from them, is the host of the party, and it is revealed through the questioning of Benny that Eva has taken advantage of her parents' planned absence to host the impromptu party in their house.
When Georg and Anna depart again for the weekend, Benny invites a girl he has seen outside the local
video store to his home. After they watch the video of the pig slaughter, he unveils the slaughtering gun and kills the girl, which is captured on a video monitor. After choir practice, Benny returns home and arranges an evening out with friends before moving the dead body and cleaning up the blood, which Benny continues to capture on video. He goes to a dance club and stays overnight at his friend's house. On his way home, he has his head shaven.
At his home, Benny's father harangues him about his haircut. While the family is watching the news in Benny's room, Benny switches the video to the one he has made about him killing the girl. Benny reveals the body in his closet, and Georg removes the videotape. In the living room, Georg and Anna discuss their options and ultimately decide to dismember the body.
Anna takes Benny away on vacation to Egypt, and Benny seems barely affected by the murder he committed. They return home after six days and Georg has cleaned the apartment of any traces of the murder. When Georg asks Benny why he killed the girl, Benny replies nonchalantly.
On video, a pilot and passengers appear in a party hosted by Eva, this time with Georg and Anna's permission. In reality, Anna and Georg watch the video with Benny and discuss how well their daughter does playing the game. Later, Georg and Anna attend the concert of the choir Benny is in. Again in reality, Benny's recording of his parents discussing the disposal of the body is shown and a voice-over asks, "Why did you come to us now?" Benny is being interviewed by policemen, and he answers merely, "Because". With no following questions, Benny asks if he can leave now. Afterwards, Benny meets Georg and Anna in the hall and, after a long moment, says, "Entschuldigung" (translated as "Sorry"). On video, his parents are seen escorted by police officers.
Cast
Analysis
Writing in ''The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey'' (2009), Bartłomiej Paszylk notes that ''Benny's Video'' captures the phenomenon of the "
video
Video is an Electronics, electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving picture, moving image, visual Media (communication), media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, whi ...
culture" that began in the 1980s and was continuing to develop at the time the film was made.
Some critics and viewers, including filmmaker
Maximilian Le Cain, note that, despite Benny's act of violence, he remains a sympathetic character, and that the film ultimately thematically indicts his disaffected parents. Paszylk suggests that the film is structured in a way that makes it "tough to recognize the movie's true villain."
Film scholar Catherine Wheatley observes that the film prominently features a "metatextual troubling of levels of reality" through its aesthetic integration of Benny's handheld camcorder footage, sound, and static cameras, rendering the audience in an "extremely distanced, 'objective' relationship to the narrative."
Release
''Benny's Video'' premiered at the
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes Film Festival (; ), until 2003 called the International Film Festival ('), is the most prestigious film festival in the world.
Held in Cannes, France, it previews new films of all genres, including documentaries, from all around ...
on 13 May 1992. It subsequently opened at the
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival (NYFF) is a film festival held every fall in New York City, presented by Film at Lincoln Center. Founded in 1963 by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel with the support of Lincoln Center president William Schuman, NYFF i ...
on 28 September 1993.
[
]
Critical response
Stephen Holden
Stephen Holden (born July 18, 1941) is an American writer, poet, and music and film critic.
Biography
Holden earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1963. He worked as a photo editor, staff writer, and eventually be ...
of ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' praised the film, writing: "What gives the film a chilly authenticity is the creepy performance of Arno Frisch in the title role. Cool and unsmiling, with a dark inscrutable gaze, his Benny is the apotheosis of what the author George W. S. Trow has called "the cold child," or an unfeeling young person whose detachment and short attention span have been molded by television. Or in other words, Mr. Trow adds, "A sadist."" The film earned an "honorable mention" nod from William Arnold of the ''Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The ''Seattle Post-Intelligencer'' (popularly known as the ''Seattle P-I'', the ''Post-Intelligencer'', or simply the ''P-I'') is an online newspaper and former print newspaper based in Seattle, Washington (state), Washington, United States.
Th ...
'' in his list of the best films of 1994.
Writing for Film4, Matt Glasby described the film as "the cinema of dread rather than of surprise; a curtain-twitching thriller (sans thrills) about how evil creeps in unseen when all seems safe, still and banal."
Eric Henderson, reviewing the film for ''Slant Magazine
''Slant Magazine'' is an American online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New Yor ...
'' in 2006, derided it, deeming it "a smug, contemptuous, passive-aggressive attack on the dehumanizing effects of media, without even the common decency to offer shrill sensationalism
In journalism and mass media, sensationalism is a type of editorial tactic. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers. This style of news reporting encourages biased or emoti ...
to punch up its subsequently feckless, reactionary, pomo assertions."
, the film has a 64% approval rating on the internet review aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews and ratings of products and services, such as films, books, video games, music, software, hardware, or cars. This system then stores the reviews to be used for supporting a website where user ...
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator, review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee ...
, and a 60/100 on Metacritic
Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...
.
Home media
Kino International
The Kino International is a film theater in Berlin, built from 1961 to 1963. It is located on Karl-Marx-Allee in former East Berlin. It hosted premieres of the DEFA film studios until the Berlin Wall#The Fall, fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. T ...
released the film on DVD
The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...
in 2006. The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home video, home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A "sister company" of art film, arth ...
released the film on Blu-ray
Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of high-defin ...
in December 2022 as part of a Michael Haneke trilogy comprising his first three films, alongside '' The Seventh Continent'' (1989) and '' 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance'' (1994).
References
Sources
*
*
External links
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Benny's Video
1992 films
1992 horror films
1992 drama films
Austrian crime films
Austrian horror films
Austrian independent films
Films about dysfunctional families
Films about filmmaking
Films about murder
Films about security and surveillance
Films about snuff films
Films directed by Michael Haneke
Films set in Egypt
Films set in Vienna
Films shot in Vienna
Swiss crime films
Swiss horror films
Swiss independent films
1990s German-language films
1990s English-language films
1990s French-language films
English-language horror films