Dir. John Polson, 2005, USA, 101 mins
Cast:
Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Elisabeth Shue
Hide and Seek is a rather confused film: it wants to scare you, but be more complex than a suspenser; it wants to attract you, but depicts many repellent acts; it wants to beguile you with depths of meaning and appetising performances. The trouble is its stories won't allow any of this.
David Callaway (de Niro) is a psychologist, but only in the Hollywood sense: he wears glasses, likes writing in his notebook and shuffles through platitudes about 'anger' and 'keeping things inside'. He lives in New York, but only in the Hollywood sense. His wife Alison ( Irving ) and daughter Emily (Fanning) live in Manhattan. Relations with his wife seem to be rather strained, and she dies early on, leaving David and Emily to uproot upstate, leaving David's protégé Katherine (Janssen) looking handsome and professionally concerned.
Given that words such as 'red', 'see', 'cat' and 'man' loom out of the opening credits in blood-red child's writing, it's not surprising that their new house is isolated and spooky. The sheriff and house agent are the first of several creepy men who eye up Emily ambiguously. "There's nothing to be scared of in these woods", says the sheriff. Of course there isn't.
Emily, silenced by her mother's apparent suicide, announces that she has a new friend, Charlie, who doesn't like her father. Several swinging lanterns, bouts of suspicious antics from neighbours and sudden blackouts later, a pattern of deaths at 2.06 am - the same time Emily's mother was found dead - emerges. First to go is the cat. There was a shot of it in the car on the drive up, so it was doomed. Next up is scrumptious local divorcée Elizabeth (Shue), who'd made the mistake of coming round for dinner. The body count then accelerates.
There is the inevitable twist - it seems impossible for studio's suspense films to survive without one since The Sixth Sense, so once again actors' performances are neither whole when we first experience them nor when one is forced to review the film through a different lens. In Hide and Seek the suspense is undermined, partly because it's all only real in the Hollywood sense of the word - you can imagine for yourselves the fatuous dialogue or how convincing anyone's situation in life is - but also because we were only seeing one side of things all along. All the film's energy builds to the twist and rather than cast a new light on what we've seen, it questions it all. The answers are rather unflattering to writer Ari Schlossberg, director Polson et al. and merely satisfy the plot rather than stem from the characters or their situation.
Hide and Seek would have worked better if the twist and its aftermath had been strong, but they are sadly the weakest links in an otherwise relatively presentable chain. Amy Irving doesn't have much to do but is very good at it. Dakota Fanning's face has an expressive, melancholic cast that is quite moving. There are glimmers (though only glimmers) of hope for those of us longing to see de Niro back in something more substantial than Meet the Fockers.
Come the end, Emily is back in sunny Manhattan before you can say 'therapy', and drawing a happy picture, which makes a pleasant change. The camera then tilts down to show that she has added another head to her drawing of herself. We are supposed to think that she has the beginnings of a split-personality, but her actions throughout the film hardly seem likely for an otherwise balanced young girl. But then the whole film hardly seems likely. Unfortunately, it's not scary, moving or eye-catching either.
Richard Dilks
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