There are few, if any, current major American films with the austerity and inconclusiveness of Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden), nor any as layered with subtextual, allegorical or political meaning. A tour de force of narrative control and dramatic restraint (with not a single note of music to cue our emotions), the film lures us in gradually, ultimately making us complicit in the voyeuristic thrill of watching the most ordinary seeming situation crumble before our eyes. In it’s Hitchcockian use of the thematic Everyman exposed to violent disruptions and escalating menacing threat, the film is at once deeply suspenseful and disquietingly paranoia-inducing.

On the surface, the story (written by Haneke) follows the slow implosion of a bourgeois French intellectual couple as surveillance videotapes of an increasingly invasive and personal nature periodically appear on their doorstep. Crudely drawn images of a child with blood flowing from the mouth as well as a decapitated chicken begin to accompany the tapes. Georges Laurent, the husband, a host of a literary TV chat show, is smug, self-assured, and blandly complacent. He begins to suspect who may be behind the terror campaign, but refuses to reveal this information to his devoted wife, Anne, a successful publisher. This is but one inflection of the title “Hidden,” that the husband cannot trust his wife enough to bring her into his confidence. Both struggle to hide the tapes, and the fears and tension they inspire, from their 12 year old son Pierrot, who clearly is also hiding something from his parents.

Moving deeper into the story (don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything), we discover a next layer of deception and hiding. When he was six, Georges had done something awful to an Algerian boy his age named Majid. When Georges’ parents were preparing to adopt Majid after his own parents were killed by police during a Franco-Algerian protest in 1961, Georges tells a sequence of lies to ensure the boy is sent away. Is Majid behind the videotapes, and what does he want? Revenge, money, recognition? Dreams and nightmares of the boyhood interchanges begin to haunt Georges who has not only hidden the wrong he has committed from his wife, but to a large degree, from himself. The fits of rage and annoyance he exhibits suggest a man barely coming to terms with actions that may be coming back to haunt him and his family.

With its clash of classes and cultures, bourgeois Europe and ghettoized Algerian, Caché also obliquely examines the extent to which a colonial nation hides the damage it does to its colonies, and similarly the refusal of the elite class to pay attention to the afflictions of its minorities, immigrants, and once-colonized. In this sense, the film is remarkably prescient, predating but predicting the recent uprising between African-immigrant populations and native French. In one extraordinarily provocative shot, the Laurents discuss the whereabouts of their son while brutal scenes from Iraq flicker on the TV news. Haneke is none-too-subtly reminding us of the degree to which we brush unpleasantness from “over there” in order to function in our own society: for intellectuals like the Laurent couple, the violence of the war may be a topic of discussion on TV, but is fundamentally kept at bay.

Caché recalls Lost Highway by David Lynch since both concern the ominous delivery of surveillance footage. There is technically speaking one fascinating difference between these films, namely: in Lynch’s there is a distinct contrast in film stock from the main story and that of the videos (the film within a film) that the distraught couple watches. In Haneke’s handling, the film stock remains the same. Oftentimes, we may have no idea when we are watching the “reality” of the main story or the pre-recorded one as now viewed by Georges and Anne. One result is that everything suddenly becomes part of the surveillance video, as though a god, or perhaps a guilty conscience, were recording everything from a fixed standpoint in any room or place, judging it with unblinking objectivity.

The conclusion is almost maddeningly open-ended. A hint dropped almost haphazardly causes one to rethink virtually all that came before. I haven’t seen that kind of bravura and nonchalant gesture since Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).

As in La Pianiste (known in the US as The Piano Teacher), Haneke explores repressed violence and the rotten underbelly that can lurk beneath the most unsuspected places. His cast is sublime: Daniel Auteuil (Georges) is stunning as a man of confidence and power becoming unraveled. Juliette Binoche as ever is compelling and riveting to watch. For a brutally realistic film, these two are so readily believable as to give the film the feeling of a documentary. With its domestic theme, such intimacy is both revelatory and invasive: we watch them both via the safe distance of a conventional film and from the voyeuristic eye of a surveillance camera.

* * * * * * * * *

In French, with subtitles; 117 minutes.

Recommended: Yes