Benny's Video

Benny's Video centres on a fourteen-year-old boy from a comfortable Vienna household whose world has shrunk to the screens and video equipment filling his room. His parents, often absent, try to make up for their distance with expensive technology, and Benny fills his days with violent films and his own amateur recordings. When he witnesses a pig being shot dead on video, the boundary between what he watches and what he does begins to dissolve, setting him on a path toward a terrible act that he then films himself. What follows is less a study of a crime than of parents confronting what their son has become.

Michael Haneke wrote and directed the film, the third of the fourteen features he has directed and the middle entry of a loose trilogy that began with The Seventh Continent and continued with 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Arno Frisch plays Benny, with Angela Winkler and Ulrich Mühe as his parents, Stephanie Brehme as his sister, and Stefan Polasek and Ingrid Stassner in supporting roles. Veit Heiduschka and Bernard Lang produced the Austrian-Swiss co-production, which runs 110 minutes.

Reaction has been divided in a way that is unusual for the film's reputation. On IMDb it holds 7.1/10 from just under 21,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.9/10 from a much smaller base of around 400. The film critics' rating of 5.8/10 from thirteen reviews places it below both audience measures.