Don't bother getting comfortable when you sit down for Michael Haneke's perplexing and disturbing, Paris-set drama, Caché (Hidden). As soon as this quietly terrifying film opens with a seemingly innocuous shot of a street that turns out to be footage from one of several mysterious and unnerving video tapes sent to bourgeois couple Georges and Anne Laurent, the unease starts to fester.
The premise is fiendishly simple: Parisian couple Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) start receiving videotapes of their home from an anonymous stalker. But there are many layers to this mystery, some of them tied directly to France's colonial past. Part paranoid thriller, part political allegory, Hidden makes a terrific watch. This film never lets go. Who's sending the increasingly personal tapes (there are drawings, too), and why? Could it be an obsessive fan of the TV books show Georges hosts? Or is it, as Georges becomes convinced, something to do with his childhood ill-treatment of an Algerian boy? Well-mannered George's childhood secret is connected to an historical event, when a large number of Algerians protesting their conditions were drowned in Paris, in 1961. And so the film begins to methodically unravel the many meanings of the title: here are hidden cameras, hidden secrets and people of colour who might as well be hidden for all the notice that wealthy white people like Georges and Anne take of them.
Without bashing viewers over the head, Haneke raises questions of guilt, responsibility and complacency that have global implications. Yet he never gets distracted from the business of building suspense, keeping things so taut you worry the film'll snap in the projector, taking your nerves with it. Finessing the merciless technique of Funny Games and The Piano Teacher, Haneke subjects us to an exhilarating ordeal of long takes, no music, and in the second half (that's all the warning you get) one almighty moment of shock. But he doesn't play by traditional thriller rules, leaving audiences to work out whodunnit from a clue discreetly buried in the final shot (so pay very close attention). Haneke doesn't just communicate anything to be left up to the viewer; he stacks up many ideas for the viewer to pick through. This brilliantly disturbing movie is constructed with surgical precision.
French with English subtitles
*****
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