Michael Haneke's HIDDEN is a fantastic and unnerving study of voyeurism, racial tension and past mistakes and skeletons in the closet that can come back to haunt people and affect the present. The film begins with one long static camera shot of what is the front of a house, after the credits end, the picture then rewinds itself backwards, and we hear voice overs of Parisian couple Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche), they are watching a video that they have received that morning and they cant make any sense of why they received it. Georges is a TV presenter for a literary review show, and his wife is a book publisher, and they live a comfortable life, though this is disturbed when they receive more videos, and trying to look for reasons for why this is happening, Georges comes to the possible conclusion that the perpetrator, maybe a Muslim man called Majid, who in Georges childhood, his family adopted as a child, and who he believes maybe the one sending the tapes and is taking a revenge on an incident that Georges instigated back in his childhood towards Majid. Without using flashy direction and rather using long static camera shots, a soundtrack composed only of natural sound, no composed soundtrack, and tense unnerving pace, make HIDDEN a thriller, that could have approached its subject in a more flashy direct fashion, though this would have lessened the impact of the film, which remains unnerving and tense throughout. Haneke uses the clever method, of showing the videos on screen, as if are watching them along, with Georges and Anne, and in turn implicating us into the couples harrasement, and at the same time making us voyeurs to the proceedings, crossing our comfortable audience boundaries and invading our sense of what we are seeing. The performances from Auteuil and Binoche are superb. Georges becomes increasingly isolated and fractured throughout, a run in with a black youth is an uncomfortable scene that indicates some of his racial anxiety that comes to light in later scenes. Binoches is excellent in a superb role, that could have ended up being poorly handled, though she brings a depth to the role of Anne, as she becomes increasingly frustrated by her husbands refusal to talk about the past incident which could be the key to whats happening. The film overall is one of Haneke's best works, a superb examination of past incidents, that have fuelled racial tension in France, and still carry on to this day, and the cause and effects of being surveyed and spied on, that becomes ever more prevalent in our lives, in a society dominated by CCTV monitoring, and that states need to focus and watch the individual.
