Benny's Video is a 1992 psychological horror[2] film directed by Michael Haneke and starring Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, and Ulrich Mühe.

His emotionally absent parents, Georg and Anna, provide him with televisions, cassette players, and recording devices to encourage their son's hobby, seemingly unaware of his fascination with filmed violence.

Benny repeatedly views a home video he shot on a European farm, which captures the slaughter of a pig with a captive bolt pistol.

[2] Some critics and viewers, including filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain, note that, despite Benny's act of violence, he remains a sympathetic character, and that the film ultimately thematically indicts his disaffected parents.

Cool and unsmiling, with a dark inscrutable gaze, his Benny is the apotheosis of what the author George W. S. Trow has called "the cold child," or an unfeeling young person whose detachment and short attention span have been molded by television.

[7] Writing for Film4, Matt Glasby described the film as "the cinema of dread rather than of surprise; a curtain-twitching thriller (sans thrills) about how evil creeps in unseen when all seems safe, still and banal.

"[8] Eric Henderson, reviewing the film for Slant Magazine in 2006, derided it, deeming it "a smug, contemptuous, passive-aggressive attack on the dehumanizing effects of media, without even the common decency to offer shrill sensationalism to punch up its subsequently feckless, reactionary, pomo assertions.

"[9] As of July 2023[update], the film has a 64% approval rating on the internet review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes,[10] and a 60/100 on Metacritic.