Caché

(Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy 2005, 118 min., 35mm, French w/subtitles)

(In)visibility. One after another, ominous surveillance tapes, shot from a hidden camera across the street, arrive on a French family’s doorstep. Viewing their private lives on television, through the increasingly intimate gaze of their voyeur, the family recoils and slowly begins to unravel. This setup would suggest a typical paranoid thriller, but Austrian auteur Michael Haneke (Palm d’Or winner for 2009’s The White Ribbon) studiously avoids the genre’s clichés and pitfalls. Rather than generate horror through a pulse-pounding score and fussy camera work, Haneke instead reveals the horrors latent in our personal and collective memories.