Caché

Michael Haneke won Best Directors honour at Cannes in 2005 for Caché, a riveting, highly disturbing feature that offered further proof, if any further proof was needed, that the Austrian filmmaker, who now works primarily in France, is one of contemporary cinema’s great masters. (Haneke’s The White Ribbon won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2009.) Daniel Auteuil, as George, and Juliette Binoche, as Anne, star as an affluent Parisian couple whose comfortable, complacent existence is ruptured by the arrival of a series of mysterious videotapes. The tapes, sometimes accompanied by sinister drawings, contain surveillance footage of the couple, their young son, and their apartment house. Some unknown stalker is secretly filming the family with a hidden camera, but to what purpose? The answer appears to lie somewhere in George’s past. Made with Haneke’s typical formal rigour, mixing high Hitchcockian tension with pungent social/political critique, and, like many a Haneke work, merciless in its assault on bourgeois complacency and denial, Caché (“hidden,” in English) is a shattering film which dares to challenge our every perception and assumption. “An incredibly gripping and tightly-wound psychological thriller . . . True to [Haneke] form, the feeling of suspense and impending doom that permeates Caché is often overwhelming” (Dimitri Eipides, Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 121 mins.