Rating: 4.5/5
Criterion Challenge 2023 | 17/52 | Dysfunctional Families
We open with a video of men taking a pig from a barn. The pig screams out in fear as the farmer puts a captive bolt pistol to its head and kills it. The video rewinds to before the gunshot. It plays back the slaughtering in slow motion as the pig writhes on the ground, dying but not dead straight away.
Benny’s mom tells him to watch TV, so he turns on a news story about football hooligans beating up immigrant asylum seekers.
Benny’s room has a nice TV, Betamax player and camera, and racks of tapes. Rather than open the window, he has a live camera view of the outside. His affluent parents funded it all.
Benny goes to the video rental store and watches part of an exploitation flick. He checks out the tape and watches it as he falls asleep.
Benny’s home alone for the weekend. He invites a girl he sees at the video store to his place. They experiment with his video camera for a bit. He rough-houses with her, putting her in a headlock.
He puts on the pig-killing video for her. Rewind. They watch again in slow motion.
He then shows her the captive bolt pistol he stole and loads it. He tells her to pull the trigger. She won’t. He takes it from her. She jokingly tells him to pull the trigger. He does, into her stomach.
She screams and screams. He tells her to stop. She won’t, so he keeps loading it and shooting her, murdering her.
His live camera catches it all.
He covers her body with the bloodied sheet and goes downstairs to have a yogurt. He does some doodles, watches TV, and cleans up the blood.
Benny gets naked and films himself as he smears some blood on himself. He films her body, being sure to pull down her rumpled skirt. He turns her over so he can see all of it.
Benny lives his life acting as though nothing has happened, but the impact is showing in other ways — shaving his head and assaulting kids in class.
He eventually shows the video to his parents. His father, realizing that the police will blame him and their reputations will be in shambles, works to cover it up while Benny’s mother trembles. His father chastises his mother when she cries. He asks Benny:
— Are you scared? — No.
No one makes me feel more ill than Haneke, but for all the directors who do, his motivation is understandable. He is one of the few directors who incorporates darkness convincingly. He doesn’t shoot violence in a heightened way — he looks at it with as sterile an eye as a kid doing homework.
Benny talks about violence in movies, saying he watched a documentary about filmmaking and knows all the tricks and that it’s fake. This is minutes before he takes the girl upstairs and murders her. We know it’s fake — Benny told us so. But it is authentic in this world. The impact blurs the edges.
If it feels authentic to the viewer, then what is the difference?
Stray Thoughts
- If Arno Frisch isn’t in therapy, then god help him. His performance is incredible.
- Why play Pilots and Passengers? How is it a game? You give away money for a position on a scoreboard.
- A guy shaving his head is like a woman getting bangs. They are going through it.
- Cleaning up milk on the counter as it spreads like blood.