Hidden Details

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Worst. Film. Ever.

Utter merde. Every bit as bad as most people here have said, and then some.

I like French films. I like films that are difficult, or challenging, or don't pan out the way I would expect. I sometimes like films that are ambiguous or lack resolution. None of these things excuse Hidden for its appalling, implausible story and its deliberate 'two fingers to you, viewer' lack of an ending.

At the core of this film is a laughably stupid conceit - the idea that the unfriendly behaviour of a boy of six years old towards another could haunt him into his adulthood and lead to repressed feelings of guilt. Come on. Have you ever met any kids, Michael Haneke? They are sometimes a bit mean to each other. Big deal. Don't use it as some cr-ppy metaphor for international politics. It doesn't hold up.

Despite what you may have heard, this film has nothing to say about politics. Or Algeria, or immigration, or French colonial history. It's an utterly implausible and deeply boring story that doesn't withstand any scrutiny whatsoever.

Apparently, Haneke has said that anyone who still wants to know at the end who is sending the tapes 'hasn't understood the film.' Oh pur-lease. It's a film based entirely around the story of these mysterious surveillance tapes, and a couple's attempts to find out who is sending them. It's the only thing that moves the narrative forward.

Nothing in this film makes sense or is believable. The flashback scenes to the chilhood will leave you scratching your head thinking 'yeah, and...... ?' The sudden suicide is just horrible and unnecessary. A waste of two brilliant actors. If you want to see Auteuil

and Binoche in something decent, rent La Veuve de St Pierre instead. That film is slow, but it's an absolute masterpiece compared to this dross.

Not deep. Just rubbish.

Avoid. Like the plague.

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[Highly rated reviewer]

Not as clever as it would like to be

Once again, Michael Haneke delivers a film that is far too mechanical for its own good. Almost from the outset it becomes clear that the mystery 'stalker' is none other than us the audience - or perhaps the director - winkling out the guilt of one man, and yet at no point are we convinced of the singular 'importance' of the revealed event. It happened when he was six years old and has remained dormant ever since - unsurprisingly. Wider links with France's 'Algerian question' seem spurious at best and downright contrived at worst: the whole thing plays out like a personal chess game on Haneke's part (as, sadly, do all his films).

But it is undoubtedly very well made, clinical and convincing in its portrait of a self-satisfied, bourgeois, middle-class household where nothing can ever be what it seems as long as secrets taint the superficially idyllic existence. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film is the ending, in which Haneke seems to be positing that the next generation - meeting on the school steps - can find a sort of reconciliation that their fathers never managed.