Benny's Video

Aroview: This middle installment in Michael Haneke’s ‘Glaciation Trilogy’ considers under a familiar milieu of urban dread the effects of mediated violence, and one boy’s obsession with a pig slaughter snuff movie, which in turn compels him to commit heinous murder.

Surveying a landscape of desensitizing images absorbed through increasingly sterile forms of media, the film’s disturbing outlook on contemporary society stops short of accusing movies and TV as the cause of violence, yet strongly cautions that we ignore their influence at our own peril. Through all of this, Haneke’s handle on the thriller narrative remains precise, cogent, never gratuitous, and appropriately chilly in its portrait of a disconnected, disintegrating bourgeois family.

NZ International Film Festival 1993

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