A documentary film crew led by director Remy follows the routine of serial killer Ben. He introduces his parents in a store, his girlfriend Valerie, but then goes into the streets to demonstrate how he kills people. Ben claims that killing older people is more profitable, since they accumulated wealth over the years, than young people who are poor. While persecuting a victim in an abandoned factory, a sound man is accidentally killed in the shootout. The stolen money from the victims is divided for the crew to finance their documentary. Ben dumps the corpses into a lake, but when it dries out, the crew has to help dig up and hide the bodies. Ben is arrested, but escapes. He finds his parents and Valerie killed by family members of the victims as a revenge. On camera, Ben, Remy and the others are shot from an unknown assassin.
The most controversial Belgian movie of the 20th century, “Man Bites Dog” demonstrates that films with a high shock value do not necessarily also have a high quality value. Filmmed in black and white, with a hand held camera to simulate the ostensibly documentary-realistic feel of the topic of a serial killer, the film seems almost like one of those ‘found footage’ films, and by depicting an abnormal man who tries to present all of this as normal, it poses some thought-provoking, uncomfortable questions about aiding and abetting in general: it may not only apply to the voyeuristic nature of the masses fascinated by violence in media, but also to people passively accepting a war criminal or a dictator among them as something normal. The film has a lot of black humor: Ben looks into the camera and brags about his murders (“I once buried two Arabs in a wall over there, facing Mecca, of course”), while he even decides to pull the pants down on a murdered African man, to find out if the rumor is true that Black people have a large penis. In a montage of his murders, fake teeth fall out of the mouth of an old lady strangled by Ben; in an apartment invasion, Ben kills the man in the bathroom by hitting the latter’s head onto the mirror wall, and then turns around to compare that murder to the one from the film “The Old Gun” with P. Noiret. But when he chases after a little boy in the house, and then suffocates him with a pillow, the movie becomes sick itself. And that is “Man Bites Dog’s” biggest problem: it is not always able to distance itself from Ben. Its message is poignant, though: if you appease evil, do not be surprised if it turns against you, as well. Accepting violence and murder only leads to a dead end when no one is safe anymore, and even the nihilistic Ben has a small impulse of realizing the value of life when he finds his girlfriend killed by others as a revenge. Weird and bizarre, the film does not work completely, yet it is a clever contemplation on the limits of "neutrality under any cost".
Grade:++
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