Benny's Video poster & wallpaper

Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich Mühe

With videotapes serving as his surrogate parents, a misguided teenager gains his the attention he desires through the act of murder.

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80% liked it

3,303 ratings

Critics

50% liked it

6 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 45 min.

Directed by: Michael Haneke

Release Date: January 1, 1992

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DVD Release Date: May 16, 2006

Stats: 218 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (218)

  • rebvodka042099
    July 13, 2008
    rebvodka042099
    Desturbing and beautifully directed but it's probably one of Haneke's weakest movies.
  • jimbotender
    October 4, 2009
    jimbotender
    A haunting piece of art,Benny is like a neo-structuralist child of the remnants of Nazi youth.The repetitive violence he's self-subdued into,unbeknown to his parents leads us to a powerful question,that of the worth of human responsibility.
  • cacutshaw
    October 5, 2007
    cacutshaw
    Very good film. The first Haneke film I saw and was really impressed. Bleak, depressing and well told.
  • ahhh1989
    October 27, 2009
    ahhh1989
    By far my favorite Haneke film and one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen.
  • n1mr0d
    July 24, 2009
    n1mr0d
    slow by good. focus mom
  • HorrorMovieCinema
    May 2, 2009
    HorrorMovieCinema
    Benny's Video was the fifth Haneke's creation I watched after "The piano teacher", "Funny games", "The hour of the wolf" and "Cache". It is strong,allegorical,cynical and plain.With an actor's expression or line it offers you many thoughts and directions.This movie made me unders...( read more)tand why Haneke refuses to comment on the meaning of his films.You have to try and play his game.To decode his pictures and words which isn't so hard, trust me.The ending is also powerful and summarizes the whole picture.It was one of the best films I have ever seen.It is amazingly coordinated with our times even though it was filmed about 18 years ago. You should definitely try to find it! and I love Arno Frisch as Benny is Great and i also love him in Funny Games(1997) hes such a great actor and Anyways great Movie.
  • bbliumis
    January 19, 2009
    bbliumis
    hERE u have another amazing film from HANEKE.

    WATCH THIS PIG HOW DIES IN THE START.... THAT WAS NOTHING COMPARING ON WHAT U GONNA SEE!
  • Phonex
    December 20, 2008
    Phonex
    A lumbering, full-grown pig, muzzled through a leash that has been tied around its snout, is led outside the barnyard doors of an unidentified farm and into a clearing where a group of apparent bystanders cavalierly await its slaughter. The skittish, herky-jerky video image taken...( read more) from the handheld camera moves in relatively tight side view close-up to frame the head of the animal as the farmer places the barrel of a revolver onto its forehead between the eyes and, amidst its persistent (and disturbingly unnerving) suffocated grunts and squeals, pulls the trigger - the pig's body immediately collapsing to the ground, its limbs still involuntary twitching from the residual neurological response impulse to the bullet's fatal impact. The video image is then curiously paused and rewound in slow motion, the soundtrack audibly slowed to a cadent, monotonic bass to the point where the origin of the sound becomes strangely alien, disembodied, and haunted. The viewer of the amateur footage is revealed to be its unseen videographer, an adolescent named Benny (Arno Frisch), who shutters himself for hours in his dark, cluttered room perpetually immersed in the self-induced, often compounded stimuli of loud music, rented videos, and broadcast television, his view of the outside world paradoxically reduced to a live video feed onto a monitor from a camera that has been positioned to point out of his shade-drawn window and onto the street. His distracted, emotionally distant father (Ulrich Mühe) and equally disaffected, obliging mother (Angela Winkler) seem tolerant of Benny's hermeticism, even exploiting his estranged, sentinel-like omnipresence in the household and penchant for video surveillance to spy on their older daughter Evi's suspect activities after moving out of the family home, as she uses the well-appointed apartment to host a party designed to generate revenue through a pyramid scheme in her parents' absence. It is a convenient domestic arrangement of tacit mutualism (and mutual disregard) that soon reveals the moral crisis innate in their dysfunctional relationship when Benny befriends a seemingly bored and aimless young girl (Ingrid Stassner) who transfixedly watches the random features displayed from the shop window of a local video store each afternoon after school, and brings her home to share in his obsessive, alienated reviewing of the slaughter footage.

    The second installment on the correlative effects of urban alienation and media violence in contemporary society in what would become known as Michael Haneke's trilogy of "emotional glaciation" (along with The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance), Benny's Video is a provocative, confrontational, and indelibly haunting exposition on isolation, rootlessness, displaced turmoil, and human desolation. Using the opening sequence of the animal slaughter home video as Benny replays, hyperextends the moment of death through frame by frame pauses, or otherwise manipulates the resulting images captured on tape into increasingly indistinguishable resolution and textured, decontextualized audiovisual patterns of signal noise, Haneke illustrates the underlying process of cognitive abstraction - and consequently, systematic dissonance - that serve to not only dissociate the innate violence of the act with its logical consequence, but also blur the distinction between the experiential levels of fictional and real violence through the synthesis (and contextual anesthetization) of public information and entertainment in the creation of a commercially viable, commodified consumer media product. Moreover, through the narrative incorporation of Evi's pyramid scheme, Haneke also provides an intrinsic structural correlation to the collapse - and perversion - of the nuclear family in the absence of communication, trust, moral guidance, and emotional engagement as the ever-widening confidence game reveals an overarching socio-behavioral pattern of self-interest, a mindset that compels the individual to become progressively distanced from the initial source of the "investment" in order to realize profit, and the requirement of the participant's covert complicity (and cover-up) in the perpetuation of the scheme. It is this underlying disarticulation of moral responsibility and dissociation of cause and effect in the wake of media saturated infotainment and socially fostered, empty shell games of deflected accountability that is inevitably reflected in the film's eerie prescience on its examination of the consequence of desensitizing technology and the pervasiveness of media violence - a senseless and tragic portrait of empty privilege, alienated communication, and despiritualized bankruptcy.
  • daghka
    October 13, 2008
    daghka
    Haneke has a way of really making the audience feel uncomfortable. This film is by far his best and the most accomplished in how he intermingles video with film and plays with it and toys human emotions in the cinema. I personally was totally twisted in my mind absolutely watchin...( read more)g this and I am saying that because because I am still twisted and have no definite term to say anything regarding this. The whole idea of the destructive impact of video and the life it encapsulates is just fascinating and I wonder how this is for someone involved in that business like Haneke.
  • egyptiansushi
    June 26, 2008
    egyptiansushi
    Another wonderfully woe ending by Haneke.

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Critic Reviews

April 18, 2007
Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness

[Makes] arguments that Haneke delivers with frosty menace but, alas, an also typically pedantic, haranguing tenor. full review

View more Benny's Video reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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