Garlanded with the title of Europe's Film of the Year from both the European Film Academy and the International Critics, Austrian Michael Haneke's extraordinary film is, like most of his movies, thoroughly nasty to the audience there to appreciate it. But this time, apart from one split-second piece of shock tactics, there is nothing to make you want to turn away from the screen.
Haneke's theme, coldly but brilliantly laid out before us, is bourgeois guilt, which he clearly believes we all should share. His protagonists are Parisian intellectuals Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche). Georges is the presenter of a television books programme and the couple live a privileged life. But then it is disturbed by a series of videotapes, accompanied by ominous drawings, which are pushed through the letterbox.
One of the tapes shows the farmhouse where Georges grew up and from where Majid, an Algerian boy who was going to be adopted by the family, was sent away to an orphanage because Georges had told lies about him. Increasingly disturbed, and directed by another tape, Georges searches out the adult Majid and threatens him. But the tapes keep coming and, when Georges and Anne's son goes missing, the police are called in.
Regardless of what Haneke is trying to say about racism, it is the way he says it that renders the film exceptional. From the threeminute static shot which opens the proceedings, to the many tantalising hints that the film-maker offers us, Hidden is masterfully controlled. The couple's paranoia, as they grasp at every possible clue, is calibrated with a cold, almost cruel eye for detail.
We, too, want to know who sent the tapes. But we are never told, though there is a final shot which suggests a solution. That, however, is not the point of the film. It is memorably about the unease we should all feel, much like the couple who slowly but surely come to know that they cannot escape a guilty colonial past by burying themselves in a well-lined present.
Hidden (Cache)
Cert: 15
