Michael Haneke’s Hidden has instilled a real paranoia in me, to the point where any static shot that lasts longer than ten seconds with little concentration on the characters feels as if someone is peering in, watching them voyeuristically.

Looking back on some of his previous films – 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher (bits and pieces, most significantly the end shot) and The Seventh Continent – Haneke frequently sets up still shots of his characters, sometimes out of frame, with cars and people passing by. Because of this you really get the feeling that the characters are being watched, and because of how imprecise the shots are in focusing on the character’s actions, the voyeur always seems like a stranger to them. I’m not sure what I just said was his intention in those films, and it only really occurred to me because I watched Hidden first, but now those situations are made creepier and more intense. Hidden well and truly messed up my brain, and given how it’s altered the way I look at Haneke’s previous works and in general any static shot that lasts for an uncomfortable amount of time, it is probably the creepiest film I’ve seen in recent years and definitely one of the most thrilling. Despite Haneke’s minimalist approach, there are so many layers to it. It digs deep.

From the opening credits we are confronted with an image of a cosy Parisian house. Compared to other things Haneke has confronted us with, yes, this isn’t very alarming; it’s not exactly on the level with Georges and Anne’s kid being gunned down in Funny Games or graphic self-humiliation in The Piano Teacher, but we see this still image, the only changes being the occasional car or bicycle cruising past, and we study it hard. Credits unfold slowly on the screen, so slowly that you’re almost forced to look at the image as a result. You end up looking over and analysing it until you have it memorised in full detail. This sets up the concept of Hidden straight away; after minutes of staring at this image we see a distortion of the image as time starts running backwards. A tape is being watched by the owners of the house, Georges and Anne Laurent, a tape that has been sent to them containing hours upon hours of footage of the house’s exterior. Disturbed, they have no idea who’s sending them, and they become baffled at how they seem to miss the cameraman; at one point you see footage of Georges walking straight past the camera, oblivious to it. The more their paranoia grows, the more our paranoia grows. Haneke masterfully depicts a domestic nightmare, a family reacting to the idea that they’re being constantly watched and tormented by an unknown.

The sender delivers another tape, this time packaged with a crude drawing of a headless chicken. Georges is unnerved by this and acts as if it reminds him of something. He tells Anne that he has an inkling as to who the sender is, but cannot say. This sends her over the edge. She finally communicates to him just how terrified she is, but still he refuses to talk about it. This lack of trust causes them to drift apart throughout the film. Secrets of his, reminders of his past surface in the tapes and drawings, and for a relationship built on mutual trust, the two of them realise they’ve been keeping secrets from each other for a long time.

From a café, Georges keeps his eyes glued to the windows. At home he shelters himself by closing all the curtains, peering out of his bedroom window through a slit. More tapes arrive, one depicting his childhood home, and another filmed from the back seat of a car. They pause the tape and his wife points out a street sign, which they attempt to decipher. Using the tapes as a reference point, Georges follows the path of the sender, and as he does this, figures from his past come back to haunt him both physically and in dreams. He relives a nightmare he considered long buried.

When their son Pierrot disappears, it sends them into a state of hysteria. To their relief, Pierrot arrives the next day, having gone to a sleepover without telling them. Anne berates him for this but Pierrot acts indifferent towards her, an attitude not present earlier in the film. He insinuates that he knows a secret of hers concerning an affair. Whether this relationship happens is left ambiguous; we see a few intimate moments that could be the result of sympathy and not love, but it occurs to her that perhaps the tapes are being sent not only to them. Shortly after this, Georges is contacted at work. A co-worker has been sent a tape, and suggests Georges call the police. He believes the sender is out to wreck his career.

Invasion of privacy is one of my biggest fears, so their terror was essentially my terror. Like Georges and Anna I found myself meticulously studying the footage. Throughout the film they do exactly what the sender wants them to do, and at this point I realised that we as the audience were doing what Haneke intended, too. We were as desperate as they were for answers and we both were affected similarly.

Now, Haneke always has a social criticism to make, and in Hidden his primary focus is the racial tension in France. This is one of things that becomes obvious after a few viewings. You can look at it as a continuation of what Haneke got across in his first French feature, Code Unknown (which also starred Juliette Binoche). There is a scene where Georges nearly walks in front of a passing black man on a bicycle and berates him, even though it is clearly Georges’ fault. It’s almost straight out of Code Unknown; the scene I am thinking of is the beginning tracking shot where a guy drops rubbish into the lap of a homeless woman, and a black man walks up to him and demands that he apologises to the woman for humiliating her in public. The guy refuses to apologise, incites a fight, and the black man is wrongly arrested by the police. While Georges’ outburst is minor, the point is that it is an outburst, a deep rooted belief that slips out. The film focuses mainly on the tension between France and Algeria brought on by the Paris massacre of 1961, and while the final shot opens some doors as to who the sender is, prompting you to rewatch the film with a new perspective, I think Haneke intended it to be representative of the reconciliation between France and Algeria through a new generation.

But putting that aside for a moment, is there a solution to the puzzle? Yes, no, it depends on how you look at it or how deeply you explore. There are undeniable parallels between characters and events, proving that there is in fact an explanation (or two, as I see it). This is the complexity of Hidden; what it implies is far bigger than what is shown.

Also, another thing I noticed: There’s a film by David Lynch called Lost Highway (which, I might add, is the polar opposite of Hidden thematically and in its overall execution) but it concerns a husband and wife who are sent video tapes of their house, and how they react. Sounds identical, but trust me, it couldn’t be more different. It’s interesting, because the surname of Lost Highway’s villain (or one of them at least) is Laurent, the same as Georges and Anne’s. I wonder if that’s a homage to Lost Highway in some way.