Georges (Daniel Auteuil) has been having nightmares -- rancid dreams of blood, a sickly boy and roosters from his childhood in 1950s France. The visions have been haunting him since he and his wife (Juliette Binoche) started receiving anonymous videotapes of themselves coming and going from their apartment on their doorstep. The childlike drawings accompanying these tapes, elementary stick figures of bloodied throats and slaughtered birds, begin to infiltrate his conscience.
Michael Haneke's stunning Caché (Hidden) disturbs its viewer in a patient, quiet and artful way. The film, a jewel of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, is a psychological labyrinth of guilt, fear and suspicion that does not resort to scared shrieks or a barrage of gore.
Instead, it creatively cultivates paranoia and culpability through trembling insomnia, suspect phone calls and ghosts of memory. Like Georges and Anne, the audience holds its breath, captive to the director's will. Caché, an exhilarating terror, a bloodcurdling marriage of the everyday and the odd, is absolutely sublime.
Both Auteuil and Binoche embody their characters subtly yet superbly. Auteuil portrays a man who battles the demons of his past, and Binoche excellently depicts a woman who helplessly witnesses her husband's despair and grapples with her own fear. Their strained quarrels and charged accusations of both each other and the world portray how an event can alter the chemistry of a strong marriage and skew the balance of conjugal trust.
Haneke proves a brilliant director. He adeptly illustrates the psychological vagaries of denial, dreams, defense mechanisms and repression of the past. Yet he also merits recognition as a sagacious historian, illuminating the bloody stains of a nation's crimes -- in this case, the French-Algerian war and the 1961 drowning of 2,000 Arabs in the Seine. Through the intersections of his characters' lives -- which occur both in the luxury of a middle-class neighborhood as well as the economic dilapidation of the HLM, France's low-income housing -- Haneke touches on issues such as immigration, lost chances, discrimination and racism in French society.
Haneke nimbly juxtaposes the visceral with the mundane. Amongst scenes of domesticity (dinner parties with friends), work (Georges' round-table television show) and familial union (their son Pierrot's swim meets), alarming images lurk.
Yet, somehow, Haneke makes such violence perversely beautiful -- the vain flapping of the decapitated rooster, the ruby river of blood on the wall, the silver flash of a knife before its owner slits his own throat.
But the real terror of Caché resides in the dark shadow of the past, the bloody fingers pointed at childhood crimes and adult indifference. The film's somber, morbid undercurrent menaces any peace of mind the viewer may have previously possessed.
The film is an upsetting testimony, evidence of how one incendiary suspicion can ignite a series of others -- Anne suspects Georges's veracity, Pierrot suspects his mother's marital fidelity, Georges suspects his own past. Their living room, once a place of peace, becomes a theatre of fear thanks to upsetting videos on the television screen. The indifference of the police causes the Laurent family to turn to themselves and try to solve their own mystery.
The plot of Caché mirrors its title, for the answer to its mystery remains hidden in a cinematic maze of dialogue, actions and sparing clues that truly trouble and confuse.
Despite its swiftly gruesome nature, its psychological torture, its steady injection of despondency, the film is spellbinding. Unlike most American films, this French gem offers no easy answers. In fact, it defies simple deduction, remaining an elusive, complex puzzle of twists of plot and turns of suspicion. Even the final scene confounds, bewildering the audience and requiring contemplation long past leaving the theatre.
Caché imparts its audience a bizarre legacy that invokes a strange sympathy for Georges. Nightmares may haunt the viewer -- rancid dreams of blood, a sickly boy, roosters and hidden secrets.
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