Benny's Video

Benny's Video is a 1992 psychological horror film directed by Michael Haneke and starring Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, and Ulrich Mühe. Set in Vienna, 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 Award at the 1993 European Film Awards.

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 he shot on a European farm, which captures the slaughter of a pig with a captive bolt pistol.

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. He shows her the video of the pig slaughter, and they talk about the film. She asks him if he made the film himself, then asks how it was seeing the pig die, and if he has ever seen a real dead person. Benny replies that he has not, and that the corpses in movies are all fake. He then unveils and loads the slaughtering gun. He holds it against his chest, and dares the girl to discharge it. When she refuses, he calls her a coward. He holds it against her chest, and when he hesitates, she calls him a coward also. He fires the gun, and she falls. Her falling reveals a video monitor, on which we see her crawling away from Benny and completely out of frame. We then see Benny running to reload the gun and returning to shoot her a second time, the girl crawling back partially into frame, and finally Benny reloading and firing a third time, this time killing her.

After choir practice, Benny returns home. There, as the weekend begins, Benny covers the girl's body and goes through her school bag, arranges an evening out with friends, then moves the girl's body to a closet and cleans up the blood. Some of the cleanup is seen through a video monitor while Benny edits a video of the experience. Benny goes out to a dance club and stays overnight at his friend's house. On his way home, he goes to a cinema, window shops, and gets his hair shorn to the scalp.

After his parents return, his father harangues Benny about his haircut, asking if Benny had any thought about how others would react to him now. Later on, while the family is watching the news in Benny's room, Benny switches the signal to the video he has made of himself killing the girl. Benny reveals the body in his closet, and Georg removes the videotape. He asks if anyone else knows about this, and through careful questioning finds that there are no witnesses. In the living room, Georg dispassionately lists to Anna the options they have: either to alert the authorities, with a resulting judgment of parental neglect and placement of their son in a psychiatric institution, or to destroy the evidence. Benny records their conversation as they ultimately decide to dismember the body into small pieces and flush it down the drain.

Anna takes Benny away on vacation to Egypt, and the ever-present video camera captures them both in their hotel, in the village, touring ancient tombs, watching sail-gliders at the beach, and even a private moment of Anna in the bathroom. There are several phone calls from a booth in the post office, with Benny and Anna separately taking the phone. Benny seems barely affected by the murder he committed, and he seems unable to fathom why his mother breaks down in sobs at one point during the vacation. When they return home after six days, the apartment is clean of any trace of the girl. Georg, who had stayed at home, succeeded in cutting the body into small enough pieces to be flushed down the toilet or otherwise removed. That evening, Georg asks Benny why he killed her, and Benny replies, "I don't know. ...I wanted to see what it's like, possibly". Georg asks how it was, and Benny shrugs in answer.

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.

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 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 on 13 May 1992. It subsequently opened at the New York Film Festival on 28 September 1993.

Critical response
Stephen Holden of The New York Times 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 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 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 to punch up its subsequently feckless, reactionary, pomo assertions."

, the film has a 64% approval rating on the internet review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, and a 60/100 on Metacritic.

Home media
Kino International released the film on DVD in 2006. The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray 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).