Metascore
83 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 37 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 35 out of 37
  2. Negative: 1 out of 37
  1. 100
    A perplexing and disturbing film of great effect.
  2. In this movie, Auteuil ("Jean de Florette") and Binoche ("Chocolat") are such marvelous actors, they can shift us in almost any emotional direction with a speech or a glance.
  3. Like Hitchcock, only creepier, Haneke slowly cranks up the suspense.
  4. 100
    Maurice Bénichou does the most heartbreaking work in the movie, playing a friend of Georges's. It's a character and a performance I'll have a tough time getting out of my dreams.
  5. The picture moves with stealth, enjoying its own thriller-ness as hints are laid and mislaid. There's a sense that Hitchcock is hovering in the background and cheering for Auteuil, who musters all his French superstardom to play a man having his mask of blandness torn off.
  6. Reviewed by: David Ansen
    100
    This brilliantly disturbing movie is constructed with surgical precision. Haneke lets no one off the hook least of all the viewer.
  7. Reviewed by: Richard Corliss
    100
    We the viewers are its beneficiaries, watching and waiting for something awful to happen. Here it does, first subtly, then spectacularly. The twist is not revealed until the last shot--if you keep your avid eyes open.
  8. 91
    One of the most vital and strangely gripping films in recent years, a thriller more opaque, involving and realistic than just about anything that Hollywood is capable of.
  9. Haneke echoes the theme of Hitchcock's "Rear Window": Moviemaking is basically an act of voyeurism. We secretly examine people's lives in every movie. But in this one, there is a hidden camera, a movie within the movie as it were, forcing us to observe a character along side a mysterious stranger.
  10. Binoche and Auteuil are both quietly sensational in their fracturing personae, but the film is Haneke's premier postmodern assault--less visceral, perhaps, than "Code Unknown" and the criminally underappreciated "Time of the Wolf," but more thoughtful and, in the end, deeper in the afterplay.
  11. A psychological suspense drama of the utmost rigor and originality.
  12. Laurent's crime is really the crime of being European and conquering people of color. That understood, Cache is brilliant.
  13. 88
    Casts a spell that grips you and won't let go. The film works as a provocation, on a personal and a political level.
  14. Caché seems at first glance like a straightforward thriller - about a talk-show host being stalked by a technologically savvy blackmailer. But it's really a sly, subversive commentary on conscience, race, class and inequity.
  15. 88
    A deliciously elusive mystery.
  16. Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    88
    Caché is unsettling and tense, even shocking. And its story of enduring tensions between an Algerian immigrant and a well-off French family is particularly timely.
  17. Haneke is best known for "The Piano Teacher." His latest, Caché (or Hidden) is a quieter but equally provocative attack. It's less in your face, more in your head and under your skin.
  18. Haneke peels back the layers of Georges Laurent as slowly and dispassionately as a scientist dissecting a diseased mouse. The ending arrives with the power and inevitability of Greek drama.
  19. This is the most Hitchcockian of Haneke's films. A seemingly well-adjusted man in a well ordered universe is brought to the brink.
  20. An extraordinarily taunt and suspenseful psychological thriller.
  21. Reviewed by: David Parkinson
    80
    Whether viewed as a political allegory or a domestic drama, this is the most accessible film yet from one of Europe’s very finest filmmakers.
  22. 80
    A tightly constructed drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
  23. 80
    The eerily timely subject of Haneke's film is France's unwilling encounter with the disenfranchised minorities it has tried to sweep under the rug. As one who giggled through his widely admired, irredeemably silly "The Piano Teacher," I wasn't prepared to be easily won over by Caché, but it turns out to be his most human and affecting movie to date.
  24. 80
    On a deeper level, Haneke tries to reach for political allegory on the French-Algerian War, but the film functions best as a perfectly calibrated thriller, perhaps his most accessible to date.
  25. While this film can seem politically simplistic, it is nonetheless psychologically astute, and more complicated than it at first appears.
  26. Reviewed by: Deborah Young
    80
    A tightly plotted and paced thriller whose not-so-hidden agenda is to expose the bad conscience of the world's haves toward its have-nots, "Hidden" is one of Austrian helmer Michael Haneke's most watchable and pungent works.
  27. Demanding, quietly breathtaking film.
  28. 80
    To some degree, “Hidden” is a cat-and-mouse thriller, the only problem being that mouse and cat insist on swapping roles.
  29. This brilliant if unpleasant puzzle without a solution about surveillance and various kinds of denial finds writer-director Michael Haneke near the top of his game, though it's not a game everyone will want to play.
  30. What's compelling about Caché is not the answer to the whodunit but Haneke's exacting invocation of palpable tension.
  31. 75
    What really makes Hidden so involving is Haneke's sometimes maddening insistence on keeping things vague.
  32. 75
    Anyone looking for the comfort in a tense thriller ending in a satisfying restoration of order and psychological security will be bitterly disappointed, but Haneke isn't in the business of encouraging comforting illusions.
  33. It isn't your typical scary movie--there are no "boo!" moments--but it may gradually creep you out and perhaps even more after you've seen it.
  34. As with much art of our time--music, painting, sculpture, theater--Caché in a certain way affronts us. Its deliberate contravention of our expectations, and not necessarily stodgy expectations, is part of its intent.
  35. 63
    While Caché offers food for thought, the last third is muddled.
  36. 58
    Cache is the feel-guilty movie of the new millennium.
  37. In the important things, in all the ways that really count, Caché is a handsome fraud.
User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 219 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 65 out of 119
  2. Negative: 45 out of 119
  1. 10
    Beautiful film. Long, silent shots set a perfect tone and built the tension for the more shocking and passionate scenes. Best of 2005 and one of the best of the decade. Full Review »
  2. A perplexing and unsettling masterpiece where solving the mystery is not necessary, but can be, to acknowledge it's complexity and genius. So many things are "hidden" here-the identity of the videographer, his or her motives, and perhaps most disconcertingly, Georges' part in psychological thriller. As soon as this quietly terrifying film starts, the unease slowly begins to fester.
    Georges (Daniel Auteuil), who hosts a TV literary review, receives packages containing videos of himself with his family shot secretly from his street, and alarming drawings whose meaning is obscure. He has no idea who may be sending them. Gradually, the footage on the tapes becomes more personal, suggesting that the sender has known Georges for some time. Georges feels a sense of menace hanging over him and his family but, as no direct threat has been made. As more tapes arrive containing images that are disturbingly intimate and increasingly personal, Georges launches in to an investigation of his own as to who is behind this. As he does so, secrets from his past are revealed, he continues to conceal this to his family as the walls of security he and Anne (Juliette Binoche) have built around themselves begin to crumble. Haneke's shot selection plays with us. He is meticulous about the way in which the videotapes are photographed, and he replicates their style repeatedly throughout the movie (long-range, unbroken shots made by a camera that is stationary). There are sequences where the audience is watching ordinary daily events, only to discover it's continuously shot footage of surveillance tapes. "Caché" interrogates the nature of reality by obliterating the borders between the movie and the videos within the movie. Michael Haneke doesn't play by traditional thriller rules, leaving audiences to work out whodunnit from a clue discreetly buried in the final shot. Even if you don't spot it, you'll come away satisfied. Haneke refuses to decode the scene's meaning: "About half the viewers see something and the other half don't, and it works both ways." He adds, invoking his protagonist's own mental journey, "We always fill the screen with our own experiences. Ultimately, what we see comes from inside us."
    Full Review »
  3. 3
    In all fairness, I ejected this film after the chicken slaughter scene. I know that was an integral and symbolic scene but the senseless torture of animals for a movie is unacceptable and I have no respect for a director who condones such acts. I can't believe there isn't more uproar in the reviews about this particular. Also, the premise has a major flaw. If someone is stalking you with surveillance video and footage of familiar (childhood) locations and then leaving these tapes at your doorstep, why not set up a video camera yourself to see who is doing this? Full Review »