"Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer? I try to rape him into being reflective, and into being intellectually independent and seeing his role in the game of manipulation." - michael haneke (2009)
michael haneke is without a doubt the MASTER of fucked up films. from funny games to hidden, each film will always stay with you for days after viewing. or maybe even years.
benny's video is about a kid named benny played by arno frisch (he was also in funny games which would be like, 5 years later after this movie) who spends his days sitting in his room, watching rented out vhs tapes along with his home made films. the first homemade video that's shown in the beginning is of a pig getting killed with a slaughter gun.
one day benny sees a girl who's standing outside the video store, gazing at the television from the window. he takes her back to his house and shows her some videos. he shows her the pig slaughter video and takes out the gun that was used during it. he holds the gun against the chest and dares the girl to pull it. he then holds it against her chest and calls him a coward. he then fires the gun and she falls. in the video monitor, we can see her crawling away from benny and while she's completely out of frame, benny runs to his desk to get more bullets to shoot her a second time as she is screaming frantically. he tries telling her to stop screaming and runs back to the desk to reload and shoots her again.
the rest of the film shows benny who seems completely sane about killing this girl. he ends up showing his parents the video and his parents try to figure out what to do with benny and the girl. to me this was more fucked up than the actual killing is the fact that his parents try to cover the incident by getting benny to stay with his mom in egypt for a few days while the dad tries to get rid of the girl by cutting her up into pieces and destroying all of the evidence.
there's a twist at the end of the movie but i won't reveal that. a lot of this movie has to do with how people can be influenced by violent films or basically anything we see from the news to what we read in the newspaper. personally i somewhat agree to this but just because you watch a lot of fucked up things, doesn't mean you're going to end up killing someone. it's kinda like the argument of violent video games as well.
this is probably the most interesting movie i've seen in a long time. i really love everything michael haneke has done. if you don't feel like sleeping tonight, you should definitely watch this movie.
FUCKED UP RATING: 8 OUT OF 10
OVERALL: 8.5 OUT OF 10
