Please note that this is the kind of film best approached with little or no advance knowledge. No one in his right mind should read this without experiencing the film first.

The bourgeois, safe, affluent lifestyle of the Laurents is disturbed by the delivery of a series of anonymous video tapes, containing seemingly pointless hours of their own house, as if under surveillance. The tapes are accompanied by disturbing, child-like drawings, first of a black and white cartoon head, with blood pouring out of its mouth, then from the neck and finally of a decapitated chicken. Who is watching them, and why? The creepiness of the situation unbalances everything from security to trust, and it is difficult not to be drawn into the Laurents' feelings of apprehension and fear.

Prompted by the tapes Georges (Daniel Auteuil) recalls that his parents helped an Algerian family in the 60’s. Georges resented the attention given to Majid, the young son. When Majid’s parents were killed, the elder Laurents decided to adopt him. Georges wasn't happy though, so he told his parents he had seen Majid coughing up blood – a worry because of widespread tuberculosis in the Algerian community (BBC). The 6 year-old’s lies were sufficient for his parents to abandon their plans for adoption and Majid was handed over to the social services.

Other tapes arrive, suggesting Georges drive to a particular address and knock on a particular door. There he meets Majid (Maurice Bénichou), a man about his age. They haven't seen one another since both were six. Majid convincingly denies all knowledge of the tapes, but when Pierrot Laurent doesn't come home from school one afternoon, Georges and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) have Majid and his attractive son arrested.

The plot is set up as a thriller mystery. Several times we’re unsure if we’re watching a recording or a recording within a recording. This is a case of the more you see, the less you know, in one of the most deliberately confusing movies i have ever seen.

Director Haneke cultivates ambiguity — was the tension racial or the result of jealous boyhood cruelty? It seems a metaphor about Europe's fear of the violence it has itself created and then repressed from consciousness. Like France, Georges may be responsible for depriving Algerian youth of prosperity.

While multiple interpretations are possible, and most likely no right or wrong ones, the tapes seem to exist due to Georges' own guilty subconscious. We all have a tendency to deny our own "shadows", don't we? An explanation puts Haneke behind the tapes, a post-modern deus ex machina (IMDb).

Yet there is the film's final shot, showing two characters meeting who shouldn't know one another. Haneke is delighted that he constructed the shot so about half of all viewers (me as well the first time!) fail to even notice them on a large canvas filled with extras. Based on that, as far as I can see, Pierrot and Majid's son orchestrated it.

Cleverly directed, tightly plotted and paced, well acted, gripping, easy to admire, but still...UNRESOLVED!


ps Those raised on the mainstream cinema, Haneke says in an interview on the DVD, are accustomed to an ending that resolves things, "so they can leave the film and forget it."

pps Haneke won a best director award in Cannes for "Caché " which was listed 1st in The Times 'best 100 films of the decade! (Wikipedia)