Film review: Caché (Hidden)

The tranquility of a middle-class family is shattered when they discover they are being watched and filmed by a stranger, threatening to reveal a shameful secret from their past. In the hands of the average director, such a plot would result in a standard thriller. But Austrian Michael Haneke is about as far from the average director as it gets, and while Caché has elements of the thriller genre and is certain suspenseful, there is way more being asked here than simply whodunit.

Georges and Anne (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) are the sort of smug intellectuals that you know are in for a bad time in a Haneke film. Their pleasant, bourgeoisie lives are jeopardized when videos recorded from outside their Paris home start arriving. The tapes are soon accompanied by childish drawings that appear to allude to an ugly incident from Georges’ childhood. Could these clues help the couple to solve the mystery of the sender’s identity?

The main, modern-day narrative is interspersed with intriguing flashbacks from the husband’s boyhood, which first hint at and then gradually elucidate the young Georges’ relationship with Majid, an Algerian boy whose parents worked for the family. This throws suspicion on the adult Majid (regular Haneke collaborator Maurice Bénichou) and his son as the source of the anonymous surveillance tapes. Meanwhile, suggestions that Georges and Anne’s marriage is less solid than it appears provide the possibility that the videos may originate from closer to home.

But the family’s efforts to unmask their observer are only the film’s superficial business. Look more closely and questions emerge. The view of the house in the video tapes indicates that the camera must be positioned in the middle of the street outside the property in daylight – and yet none of the family members or their neighbors notices anything amiss. And the footage is not the usual shaky cam filmmakers employ to tell the viewer that a character is doing the shooting – but instead indistinguishable from the director’s own viewpoint.

Thriller conventions are not entirely absent: there are exciting plot twists – including one extremely graphic moment – and an atmosphere of tension that seldom slackens. But Caché’s interest lies not in revealing the perpetrator, but in probing more philosophical and psychological ideas, such as France’s colonial past, the nature of guilt and innocence, filmmaking itself and the impact of being watched.

This is not a movie for everyone. Its measured progression may be too slow for some, and attempts to engage with the narrative on Hollywood terms will be frustrated – a conversation that could “solve the mystery” is deliberately inaudible (a la Lost in Translation). But the questions Caché poses will absorb viewers who like to think about what they’re watching, and its themes, techniques and open questions will stay in the mind long after more typical movies have faded from memory.