4/5
Caché (Hidden) is the kind of movie that you can't just watch and then be done with. You need someone to talk to about it because it's ambiguous, because it doesn't give you simple answers, and because it crawls under your skin and doesn't let you go. It is a tense tale of a family who becomes terrorized by their own guilt. The movie starts after they find an anonymous tape outside their door that contains footage of themselves during their normal daily routines. At first they think it's a joke, but then they start receiving disturbingly violent drawings and the story gets much more complex.
The brilliance in the filmmaking comes in the use of cinematic techniques. Instead of showing the footage as grainy, as from a hand-held DV camcorder, it is filmed with the same clarity and crispness as the rest of the movie. Every static, extended take in the film could be taped footage by the voyeur and we would be none the wiser until the characters talk over it or rewind it. The spots that the voyeur uses to videotape them later on in the film become the same spots Haneke uses to show us the action. There is no difference to alert us to what is a videotape and what is this movie. Indeed, it raises the possibility that this entire movie could serve the same purpose of terrorizing the audience and bringing skeletons out of our closets. The viewers becomes implicated by the movie just as the characters start to feel guilty about their actions; being imperfect, we the audience also all have our own dark pasts we'd rather not relive.
I loved how our opinion of the main character shifts halfway through the movie into an almost complete reversal. Daniel Auteuil's phenomenal acting makes this about-face believable. The rest of the acting was equally rich and it fleshed out the characters and environment. The editing was competent, although scenes very often went on for too long. Instead of generating discomfort and unease, the early scenes merely generate disinterest. Scenes later in the movie, however, were stretched out effectively to create and sustain tension; our own fear of what is to come is our biggest rival. Unfortunately, the story was very simple (the characters/acting are what enrich it) and the dialogue rather basic and uninteresting, save for a couple good uses of subtlety and ambiguity. It also got frustrating because sometimes people wouldn't say what they were thinking. Their silence is later explained, but it was annoying and pedestrian to watch Haneke blatantly obfuscate the plot to increase the mystery/suspense. Despite this, I highly recommend the movie as a thinking man's thriller. It effectively uses cinematic techniques and an emotional backstory to give us something we've never seen before. And to the attentive viewer, you will be greatly rewarded.
Note: At the end of the movie I became really interested in finding out more about it and its meanings (since most of the plot is left open-ended), so Sameer and I decided to see the Haneke interview on the DVD. It was very enlightening and I definitely recommend it after seeing the film. Perhaps it is a failure on the movie's part not to make some of Haneke's choices more obvious to the public, but I think I could have gleaned most of that information myself after giving it the requisite amount of time and thought (which I was willing to do). Anyway, just know that this star rating and review were given after some of our questions were answered by the director outside of the film as a whole.
IMDb link:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0387898/
