CINEMATIC Review

CACHÉ   ****

Michael Haneke

2005

IDEA:   A French couple is terrorized by videotapes that show them during their everyday lives.

BLURB:   Social apprehension and guilt captured in the bone-chilling guise of Haneke’s forever watching camera, the menace of a hidden past returning, from beyond the fourth wall, in occult snippets of voyeurism and gruesome drawings. That’s Caché, both a lesson in painstaking contemporary terror and a ghostly allegory of political remorse. Surveillance, suspicion, and shameful accountability, the main characters of the film find themselves and their comfortable placid existence crumbling deliberately around them as their visibility becomes suspect to a third party. How does one live when they know they’re being watched? The mysterious videotapes are only the beginning of this subtly crafted psychological nightmare, one which exposes itself layer by layer until what’s left is not a clear picture, but a perpetually spinning reel of tape that never forgets what it documents. And neither does it ever let us fully know.