FILM CHALLENGE: 171) Hidden

171) Hidden

Director: Michael Haneke

Year: 2005

Plot Summary: A married couple is terrorised by a series of video tapes and drawings.

Michael Haneke has crafted a truly terrifying movie with his masterpiece Hidden. By 'terrifying', however, I don't mean the usual horror movie conventions of building suspense, making you feel at ease for a minute and then hitting you a big shock, emphasised by a dramatic music score and some gore on top. Oh no. Hidden is instead more like the terror of being buried alive with an impending sense of doom that will leave your heart in your throat and an icy, disquieting atmosphere that will leave you frozen to your seat.

It tells the story of Georges Laurent, a famous host of a literary talk show on TV, who lives an idyllic life his wife Anne and their teenage son Pierrot. That's until Georges and Anne receive video tapes showing secretly filmed aspects of their private life and disturbing childlike drawings that somehow relate to Georges' past.

The title Hidden doesn't just refer to the hidden cameras which are used to film the bourgeois middle-class family at the centre of the story, it also refers to the hidden guilt that the main character, Georges, is concealing deep within him. As the narrative develops we soon begin to realise that as a boy Georges committed an act that resulted in his adopted brother, Majid, an Algerian whose parents were killed, being sent away for his family's estate and, therefore, never receiving the same quality of life that Georges was given.

This aspect of the narrative is clearly intended to be symbolic of France's guilt over the events of October 1961 in which hundreds of Algerian protesters were beaten to death by the French police. Georges, as established in a scene in which he is nearly hit by a bike rider, is a character with a distinct fear of other races and ethnicities, much like the French society of the 1950s and early 1960s who looked down on the Algerian people. Soon, this fear turns to guilt when he is forced to remember the aforementioned events from his childhood which he had buried and bares witness to the lasting effects it has had on the grown up Majid and his adult son.

So is it Majid or his son who are sending the tapes as a way of forcing Georges to remember? Is this their retribution? Well, it could be, but Michael Haneke never gives us an answer to this question. But, one theory that has floated around about Hidden is that, in fact, it is the director himself who is sending the tapes. After all, they are filmed in the same ratio and quality as the movie, it would account for the fact they were unseen because they don't exist in the world of the film, and Haneke has a reputation for breaking the fourth wall in his movies.

If this is the case, this twist may be one of the most masterful in cinematic history. It ingeniously provokes thought on the nature of the film's medium and how the director is, in fact, the person with the ability to initiate the process of remembrance in the characters and force them into certain situations.

Georges is performed by Daniel Auteuil who, when the video tapes and the drawing begin to arrive, is fantastic in his presentation of a character paralysed by the need to carry on like normal and possessed by the desire to not bring up the terrible memories of his childhood despite knowing he must. The awe-inspiring Juliet Binoche is equally brilliant as his wife, Anne, who is frightened for her family and exhausted by her husband's aforementioned secrecy.

A stunning, breathtaking work of art that is among the very best of the noughties.

5/5

By Daniel Sarath with 2 comments