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, gradually crossing the line from observers to accomplices. The film's brilliance — and its notoriety — lies in implicating the documentary form and the spectator alike in Ben's violence, satirising media voyeurism and the appetite for screen brutality years before such ideas became commonplace. Its abrupt swerves from deadpan comedy to genuine horror are deliberately destabilising.

Censored and debated around the world, it has been recognised as a landmark of transgressive cinema and a sharp piece of media critique. Funny, appalling and impossible to watch comfortably, Man Bites Dog turns the camera's complicity into its subject. It remains a defining work of Belgian cinema and a film that, three decades on, has lost none of its power to unsettle — a savage joke that implicates everyone, including the viewer. Censored and debated around the world, it has been recognised as a landmark of transgressive cinema, and three decades on its savage joke about media complicity has lost none of its power to implicate the viewer.