Benny's Video
Benny's Video is a movie about a young boy in the early 90s who kills a young girl because he doesn't seem to understand that there is a difference between the real world and the one(s) he sees in his videotapes. If that were all this movie was, I'd be ready to write it off as outdated at best and wrongheaded at worst. We've seen enough studies to know that violence depicted on screen (or in books, or in videogames) doesn't turn people into killers. Luckily there is more to the movie than that. Indeed, it is the second act, wherein we see Benny walk around the city as if nothing has happened and then tell his parents about the girl (whose body is in his closet) and what he did to her, that the movie gets really good. We see the parents reason with each other about what to do with the girl's body, and what to do with their son. And then we see their decision play out.
It's that attention to the wider situation that the parents' involvement brings that really makes the movie interesting and still relevant. It becomes not a critique of media that you might see in a lesser episode of Black Mirror but rather an indictement of the upper-middle class lifestyle that Benny's family leads. They're surrounded by replications of art, the dinner table is crowded by posters and photos from museums around the world. The older daughter is engaged in what she calls a game but is really a pyramid scheme where she and her friends frivolously spread their money amongst each other. There's a sense that the parents have almost no comprehension of who Benny is, or how he got that way (though it seems the answer to the latter lies within the former). Benny's room is a shrine to the videocassette, and we see him rewinding and replaying first the slaughter of a pig that he filmed at the beginning of the movie and then the slaughter of the girl that he captured as it was happening. As the parents try to deal with their murderous kid's actions, it becomes clearer and clearer that he doesn't comprehend what he has done, and his parents don't try to force a reckoning. If we are to blame anybody for this, we should start with Benny, then his parents, then a society that lets a family like this live as if they were doing nothing wrong. In a world where parents are disconnected from their kids, how can we expect the kids to value the lives of others?
The movie is very well made, Michael Haneke knows how to film this kind of detachment (see also The White Ribbon and Funny Games, which could concievably be a sequel to this as one of the torturers in that film is played by the boy who plays Benny in this one) and he does so by not having too many close-ups. We almost always see a good deal of the surrounding environment that the characters are situated within, and he uses Benny's camera and video setup really well in the murder scene (and later). It's an impressive movie, even if its also quite offputting (I almost quit in the first 2 minutes). I think it could have been 90 minutes which might have made it into a masterpiece. It has some of that foreign movie slowness that sometimes gets in the way of brilliance. But it's still worth a watch, if you can.
B+.