Man Bites Dog

A scandal and a sensation at Cannes, where it won the Critics' Week SACD prize, Man Bites Dog (1992) was the audacious debut of three young Belgian film-makers, made on a shoestring in stark black and white. A pitch-black mockumentary about a serial killer, it became one of the most provocative cult films of the 1990s.

Co-director Benoît Poelvoorde plays Ben, the loquacious, oddly charming murderer whose exploits a film crew dutifully records as it drifts from observing him to helping him. The film's nerve, and the source of its notoriety, is that it implicates both the documentary form and the spectator in Ben's violence, satirising media voyeurism and the appetite for screen brutality years before those ideas became commonplace. It swerves from deadpan comedy to real horror without warning, and those swerves are meant to leave you unsteady.

Censored and argued over around the world, it is a landmark of transgressive cinema and a sharp piece of media critique. Funny, appalling and impossible to watch comfortably, Man Bites Dog makes the camera's complicity its subject, and it remains a defining work of Belgian cinema. Three decades on, its savage joke about media complicity has lost none of its power to unsettle, because the joke has always included the person watching it. Few films since have been as willing to make their own audience the target.