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Title: Benny's Video (1992)
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| Complete credited cast: | |||
| Arno Frisch | ... | Benny | |
| Angela Winkler | ... | Mutter | |
| Ulrich Mühe | ... | Vater | |
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Ingrid Stassner | ... | Mädchen |
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Stephanie Brehme | ... | Evi |
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Stefan Polasek | ... | Ricci |
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Christian Pundy | ||
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Max Berner | ||
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Hanspeter Müller | ||
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Shelley Kästner | ||
A 14-year-old video enthusiast is so caught up in film fantasy that he can no longer relate to the real world, to such an extent that he commits murder and records an on-camera confession for his parents.
Both psychological and sociological factors could be behind Benny's behaviour. Or is he just a bad seed? This is a nasty film, like many of Haneke's films, bringing to mind the young people in Hidden for example. I was thinking that the children are the products of their upbringing (poor parenting, lack of real values in superficial, greed-driven society of the selfish, etc, etc). Yet few turn out quite as rotten as Benny who is a monster up there with Norman Bates - and, by the end, even worse. Of course, we are shown that the parents lack any concern for his victim or her family, with the fact that they coldly watch the slaughter of a pig early on a suggestion of how callous they can be, and so he may simply have inherited their evil. There is also the depiction of teen silence and coolness, obsession with technology and violent films or music, things that further distance Benny and add to the frustration and impotence felt by his parents. Benny is a devil but he is also a mock Jesus, stolen away into Egypt by his mother, head shaved like a monk doing penitence, seemingly innocent - we never see him show any interest in sex though he strips naked to clean up his dirty work. Then, like Jesus preached, he forsakes his parents, though it is not out of faith. This is a nightmare of a world gone irremidiably wrong.