Man Bites Dog is a funny, disturbing mock documentary, led by Benoît Poelvoorde’s alarmingly likeable killer. The satire works, though its mounting shocks become repetitive and its treatment of the camera crew is sharper than its assumptions about the audience.
Man Bites Dog puts a camera crew beside a killer and asks how long filming can pass for an innocent activity. Directors Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde make a black comedy out of the crew’s willingness to keep watching. It is nasty, funny and worth seeing if this is your kind of humour, although its appetite for further shocks outlasts their usefulness. The uncomfortable part is how much ordinary professional enthusiasm can resemble approval. The crew have a subject who holds their attention, and ours.
Poelvoorde plays Ben with the charm the film needs if its accusation is to mean anything. A merely repellent killer would make the crew easy to dismiss, and leave us congratulating ourselves for knowing better. We laughed at his affability, then felt ashamed of how readily we had accepted him as company. The violence being recorded gives that laughter a specific ugliness: the film has made the man engaging without making what he does any less appalling.
Bonzel’s cinematography uses the rough immediacy of documentary observation to make that closeness uncomfortable. The camera’s presence matters because Ben has someone to perform for, and an apparently practical reason for being watched. We are encouraged to attend to him as a subject worth recording. The method works because the filming itself becomes something to question, rather than a neutral means of showing us a crime. Ben’s behaviour is affected by the people filming him.
Editors Rémy Belvaux and Eric Dardill manage the changes between comic companionship and horror with considerable nerve. An abrupt change from humour to horror makes our readiness to be amused harder to ignore. The music, credited to Laurence Dufrene, Jean-Marc Chenut and Philippe Malempré, matters less to this discomfort than those shifts. The film lets a joke work before making the violence impossible to dismiss as part of the fun.
The writing by Bonzel, Poelvoorde and Vincent Tavier is strongest on the camera crew’s interest in their subject. Ben offers material, personality and the prospect of further incident, which makes their position as observers increasingly hard to defend. That is a precise complaint about people making images of violence. The suggestion that everyone watching those images must share their appetite is less convincing. A viewer can be disturbed by a film without accepting every charge it makes against them.
The trouble is that the accumulation of shocks gives us fewer fresh reasons to think about any of this. Once we understand why the crew keep filming, another appalling incident can feel repetitive without telling us anything more about their behaviour. The film sometimes relies on our disgust to do work the writing should be doing. Its mock-documentary form remains effective, but the later provocations are less exact about what they want us to notice.
Mock documentaries often depend on the audience feeling clever about recognising a fake. This one gives us little pleasure in that recognition, because the pretence of detached observation remains familiar even when the crimes are extreme. At 96 minutes, it has no need to keep proving how far it is prepared to go. We recommend it for the black humour, with a firm warning about the graphic violence.
