Caché

Hidden
a film by Michael Haneke

Georges, a television presenter, and his wife Anne, who works at a publishing house, are living the perfect life of modern comfort and security. But their successful bourgeois lives hide a complacency and general indifference to the outside world.

One day, their idyll is disrupted in the form of a mysterious videotape that appears on their doorstep. On it they are being filmed by a hidden camera from across the street with no clues as to who shot it, or why. At first Anne is dismissive of the tape, which appears to be surveying the exterior of their home, but Georges believes there is a sinister motive behind its unexplained appearance. Soon they receive a second tape accompanied by a disturbing drawing. Nerves become frayed and tension erupts when their twelve-year-old son Pierrot, staying at a friend's house all night without letting them know, brings fears that he has been kidnapped by the stalkers.

A third tape reveals the farmhouse where Georges grew up and where his invalid mother still resides. A visit to his mother brings back long buried memories and he is forced to confront a terrible secret, hidden since his childhood. As he begins to fear for the safety of his family, and as Anne struggles to come to terms with his revelations, their entire comfortable existence begins to disintegrate. Convinced he knows the identity of the person responsible, Georges embarks on a rash and impulsive course of action that leads to shockingly unexpected consequences.

The story is multi-layered – on one level it is a study of the colonial guilt of Europe and race relations; on a deeper level it probes the complacent and bourgeois temperaments of the financially secure classes in society; on yet another level the story explores the attitudes of three distinct generations towards social relationships. A brilliantly conceived and intriguing film, the voyeuristic camera lingering on long static shots as images pass across both foreground and background, enabling us to interpret things at our will.

It is a story about the propagation of lies to avoid confronting the guilt that remains for our past actions – and how we find ourselves ever more enmeshed in that from which we seek to escape. Haneke shows us that we all have things we want to keep hidden, but can we be sure that we are the sole keepers of our secrets? Ultimately he leaves us to decide what the truth is, or indeed whether it is not perhaps better for the truth to remain hidden.