Benny's Video

I found this movie to be very disturbing, though it is not a violent movie. Benny is a normal teenager, except for his rather horrid taste for gore and death. This is a very thought provoking movie stumbling through a couple of different immoral issues, the end of this movie was a bit different to what I was expecting and did sort of knock me off place. I give it an 8 out of 10.

It's all about shock value. Haneke's intro for this one is to desensitize you for the rest. What happened with the teenagers is nothing compared to what we see first because the first one is real (and we know it's real), what happened with the teenagers is fake and off-camera.

The discussion happens from this point. Why aren't we more shocked? Why is Benny so insensitive to what he did? It's because of his hobby. He doesn't see it as real, it's all from his camera point of view, like everything he saw before. It's just digital or analog information put on screen. He sees himself as a viewer and a camera at the same time. He is dehumanized, he is a machine, that gun was part of him as well. And like all Haneke, it's shocking.

In his second film of the "glaciation trilogy", Haneke once more hauntingly draws a torpid affluent society where the people live at cross purposes, where conservations are rare and toilsome, where communication is alienated to a technical process. Accordingly to that, the emotional life of the protagonists became stunted: Benny, after his "act", shows concernment only through surrogate actions, just like letting his hair cropped. The father immediately slyly pushes to damage mitigation, whereas only the mother indicates rudiments of emotion, though somehow tense. In a confusing blend of film and video images, Haneke creates a second level of reality, so to speak, where Benny's senseless "act" perfectly integrates in the horror pictures of the evening news and makes it open for question. At the same time, Haneke commits himself to no specific answer and denies any absolution. That is what makes this film so horrifying - there simply is no telling argument that makes a murderer out of a young boy.

If it is supposed to be a Haneke film, it does have a couple of pitfalls. It is not Haneke's best, perhaps because maybe he felt the pressure to top Der Siebente Kontinent. As someone said previously, it is rather heavyweight towards the end.

As a film without regarding who directed it, it is very good. It provides you with a raw documentary vision of a boy and his voyeuristic trend towards violence. It is rather simple yet, an amazing idea. Benny could be the boy living next door and, in fact, he is. He is not frightning on a "I know what you did last Summer" fashion. He is _truly_ frightning because he is a normal kid. And I do know a few like him. The ones I know never actually murdered anyone but, perhaps they simply didn't do it because they are afraid. Benny hasn't come to terms with that moral feeling yet and perhaps he never will.

On a metaphorical sense, it is the best portrait (along with Der Siebente Kontinent) of present day Austria, at least the Austria I see at some September rainy Vienna weekends...

Not as accomplished and tight as some of Hanekes other movies. Some episodes in the latter part of the movie could have been shortened (the vacation), and gives the movie overweight towards the end. A chilling first act, but the climax negates what has been happening all along. It raises important issues and is worth watching, nontheless.