Caché (Hidden)

A smart marriage of the thriller genre with a compendium of strong ideas about guilt, racism, recent French history and cinema itself, Michael Haneke’s eighth feature is an unsettling, self-reflective masterpiece. It opens with a lingering, static shot of a bourgeois Parisian home. We watch as a woman leaves through the front door. Strangers stroll along the street. A car passes. Birdsong permeates the soundtrack. So far, so very normal; but what are we looking at – and why?

The question is rudely answered when rows of static appear and the image blurs, then begins to fast-forward. It’s an illusion: we are, in fact, watching a video that’s been sent anonymously to the owners of this house, Georges and Anne Laurent (Auteuil and Binoche), a wealthy, middle-class couple who are ostensibly paragons of the Parisian intelligentsia. The tapes continue to arrive at the Laurents’ home, the shelves of which are full of books, videos and a large TV that sits, suggestively, centre-stage.

Some tapes arrive with childish drawings that hint at violence. Haneke also introduces vague, intermittent flashbacks of a young child that are increasingly revealing. The tapes and the flashbacks, we are led to believe, are linked and Georges becomes convinced that the videos are connected to an Algerian, Majid. He locates and confronts Majid and his son (allowing, in one scene, for a particularly jolting and unexpected coup de cinéma).

All the while, Haneke crafts the fabric and routine of Georges and Anne’s lives with cold precision, only to upset their habits violently at regular intervals: witness a sudden knock at the door during a civilised dinner with friends, or a whisper in the ear from Georges’ producer at the end of his chat show. The effect is to plant unease and suspicion at every turn. Auteuil and Binoche support this sense of implosion with superb performances.