Benny's Video

One of the most inscrutable, alarming, frustrating, and fascinating contemporary film directors, Michael Haneke has created a name for himself by examining disturbing issues (sadism, violence, suicide, racism, voyeurism, alienation, nihilism, and misguided faith) with a cold cerebral eye. BENNY'S VIDEO opens with disturbing images of a pig being slaughtered; it is one of the many images obsessively viewed and reviewed by Benny, the 14-year old son of a wealthy Viennese family. Detached and ignored, Benny seems able to experience life only through his video camera. When he kills a young girl and records it on tape, his parents go about covering up the murder, and Haneke draws everyone--Benny, his parents, and the viewers themselves--into a web of complicity and postmodern dysfunction. (official distributor synopsis)