Benny’s Video (1992): C

Anyone’s who’s seen a Michael Haneke film will know where Benny’s Video is headed from its opening VHS images of a pig’s slaughter. Modern alienation and a murderous act that defies social and moral law are right around the corner courtesy of detached and discontent Benny (Arno Frisch), a teenager with MIA parents, a successful pyramid scheme that he operates at school, and a room filled with video cameras and recording equipment that function as the filter through which he interacts with the world. When listening to heavy metal, watching horror movies and news reports about Bosnian atrocities, and poring over his pig-killing vid grow wearisome, Benny picks up a girl at his local movie rental store and brings her home. Romance isn’t the air, however, as this meet-cute quickly leads to the aforementioned brutal incident that the preachy Haneke – via an obscured video monitor perspective on the action – refuses to outright show us, a denial intended to prod and chastise viewers for wanting to see such a horror. Numerous cash transactions (between pyramid scheming kids, or at McDonald’s) are meant to be symptomatic of a society that places self-interest, greed and deception above the common good, while media-refracted violence and absentee parents are fingered as the prime culprits in our individual and cultural degeneration. They’re all arguments that Haneke delivers with frosty menace – hence the film’s status as part two of the director’s “Trilogy of Emotional Glaciation” (preceded by The Seventh Continent, followed by 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) – but, alas, an also typically pedantic, haranguing tenor.