CarnivalAskew

Yes, sometimes it's nice and good to see a film that satisfies you, that gives you what you want. At the end, all problems are solved, all questions answered, the good are good and the bad? Are bad. True is true and right is right. Well, "Hidden" is not such a film. It is the opposite: What is true and right? What not? Or, is there a truth at all? Who did it and why? The camera may stay static a lot of time, but not your mind. Anonymous video tapes, drawings, letters and calls sent to a well situated middle-aged couple show their house filmed over hours, show childlike drawn figures and blood. Who did that? And why and what for? Successful TV-talker Georges and his wife Ann, a publisher, are terrified and helpless, their stylish but unspectacular life of dinner parties with nice and intelligent friends changes completely. Bit by bit Georges gets a suspicion, about the "why", the motif of the unknown stalker. It lies in his early childhood and is connected to a dark part of French history and how they treated people from their former colony Algeria. Writer-director Michael Haneke tells us his film is about guilt. It is also about true and lies, wrong and right, history, relationships, social life, forgetting, good and bad.

Main actors Juliette Binoche and especially Daniel Auteuil play brilliant – their characters are deeply touching, arrogant, helpless, loud and quite, honest and false, in one word - real. "Hidden" or "Caché" (the French original title) has frightening suspense and tension (and this for nearly two hours!) like a horror film combined with intelligent dialogues, that show in details the feelings and thoughts of their characters, not just pushing the plot. One tip: the question "who did it?" is a trap, it is about a bit more. But you can also watch "Scary movie 4". Or both? To get the difference.