Hide and Seek Movie Review:


Had it been made more cheaply, “Hide and Seek” might have been better. I don't mean that it has the feel of some kind of big budget feature, but because of its A-list star Robert De Niro and some not-so-unknown actresses like Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, and Elisabeth Shue, the film probably suffers from taking itself too seriously. A cast of green up-and-comers might've been able to pull off this unambitious genre plot with a sense of being in on the joke; as it is, De Niro and company only create a higher potential for embarrassment.

And embarrassing it is. This is another movie that exists only for the sake of its ending. Everything that happens leading up to that point seems more concerned with creating a manufactured sense of tension that's supposed to be released at the end, regardless of whether or not it's logical. It fails because the water-treading portion of the movie literally feels like water-treading, and the ensuing payoff isn't particularly satisfying.

I'm willing to concede that the edge of this film’s ending is blunted by the growing pool of these kinds of movies with similar endings. There's simply too many of them now, and it's starting to feel as if each one is less and less imaginative. The question becomes, how many movies like this do any of us have to see before we second guess them to death? If you've had your share of M. Night Shyamalan-knockoff thrillers, you're going to walk into future offerings of these flicks and start ruining them for yourself because you know all these writers' tricks. Then they all just start feeling gimmicky.

In the case of “Hide and Seek,” point B doesn't even follow sensibly from point A, so it feels like it's cheating, trying to do less work to justify its resolution. Fanning's character forms the basis of the tension, but the path she follows in the story makes no sense. In short, she's De Niro's daughter, and she has this imaginary friend that causes real trouble in the physical world. She acts the way she acts (i.e., creepy and disturbed) just to put the audience at unease, and whether or not it works for her character doesn't seem to be an issue. This is because the movie can easily fall back on the "trauma excuse" to explain her actions. And that's plain lazy.

Believe it or not, this is actually the first time I've seen Fanning in anything, and I'll admit I admired her performance, even though her character was annoying. The fuss over Fanning seems to be that she plays much older than she seems to be, which makes her kind of creepy, but I guess that should work out well for a movie like this. It's amusement over her little onscreen duels with super-veteran-actor De Niro that give “Hide and Seek” what little entertainment value it has. It's certainly more interesting to wonder what De Niro is thinking of his precocious co-star than to second-guess the destination of this easily forgotten entry in the oh!-bet-you-didn't-see-that-coming sweepstakes.



Jeffrey Chen

Besides a nice sense of visual style, there's nothing to this creepy-child thriller, DeNiro's second in a year (at least this is better than Godsend). The plot is completely unremarkable; alert viewers will quickly unravel the mystery. But decent acting and directing make it watchable.

After his wife (Irving) dies suddenly, David Callaway (DeNiro) packs up 9-year-old Emily (Fanning) and moves to the country to get some air. A psychiatrist (Janssen) thinks Emily's new obsession with an imaginary friend is almost to be expected after the trauma, but things soon get out of hand as "Charlie" starts playing some pretty macabre games.

Polson clearly has an early-DePalma obsession (pun intended), as he saturates the film with furious colour, lurid camera work and dense orchestrations. Subtext is the name of the game--red herrings, furrowed brows and the expectation that something supernatural is going to rip through the walls at any moment. There's even an eerie music box playing a sinister version of "Mockingbird". All of this creates a wonderfully moody atmosphere, combined with Fanning's twitchy, dark-wigged performance and DeNiro's gloomy sulking.

With such a blatantly silly thriller, it's probably nit-picking to raise the logic question (why, for example, does a man with one child buy "the biggest house on the lake"?), but these things jolt us out of the story. It also doesn't help that Fanning is laughably made up to look like a demon from hell--all dark mascara and sallow cheeks. Or that the artful atmospherics are actually rather dull and pointless, building to a tedious thriller finale that's impossible to care about.

But Polson (Swimfan) is good at keeping us hooked, and in the absence of a solid story he just piles on suspense for suspense's sake alone, with glimpses of sharp implements, lighting tricks, musical jolts, shadowy side characters. By the time it erupts into horror-movie chaos, we've begun to chuckle at the film's desperate attempts to unsettle us. Honestly, if Polson wants to truly scare us, he needs to insert at least one thing we haven't seen before.



Rich Cline

Trying to cope with the unexpected suicide of his wife Alison (Irving), David Callaway (De Niro) and his distraught daughter Emily (Fanning) move away from New York to the country. As David struggles with his own emotions, Emily is becoming more and more distant, shunning him and anyone who tries to get close to her until one day she tells her father she has a new friend called Charlie. Never seeing him, David concludes that he is imaginary until strange things start happening around the house and when questioned Emily says “Charlie did it”.

As the psychological horror movies see resurgence at the box office, does ‘Hide and Seek’ have what it takes to have you cowering in fear or laughing out loud?

Horror movies that play on the minds of audiences and not just drench them in blood and gore are the ones that arguably, create the most scares and ‘Hide and Seek’ tries really hard to be one of those films. For the first two thirds of the movie it succeeds, building plot and creating a situation that keeps you on tenterhooks as you try and figure out who or what Charlie is and what his motivations are. This is helped by another performance that is way beyond her years by Dakota Fanning.

As Emily she plays as traumatised child, struggling to cope with the loss of her mother. To deal with this we see her delve into the world of fantasy by creating an imaginary friend to help her come to terms with such a devastating tragedy. At first it seems innocence enough but then her new friend ‘Charlie’ becomes angry and bitter towards her father and he becomes the focus of Emily and Charlie’s wicked games. This works well because of the performance of Dakota Fanning. She portrays both sides of Emily, the scared and frightened side and the bitter and rejected one with the skill of a seasoned professional. No wonder Hollywood always comes calling when the need a strong actor in a child’s role.

Robert De Niro is rightly haled as one of the greatest screen actors of all time but his career choices haven’t been the best over the last few years. After the heady heights of ‘Raging Bull’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘The Deer Hunter’, ‘The Godfather Part II’, ‘Goodfellas’, to name but a few, the new millennium has brought us ‘Godsend’, ‘The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle’, ‘Showtime’, ‘Analyze That’ and ‘City by the Sea’, hardly a showcase of his talents. What has gone wrong? In ‘Hide and Seek’ he plays another character that is far beneath his talents. As David, the father trying to figure out what is happening with his daughter, he seems like he is on autopilot. Gone is any modicum of the talent that brought him to the attention of the public and gained him such applaud. Instead we are greeted with a by the numbers performance that never even suggests that this is Robert De Niro in the role.

The good work by Dakota Fanning during the first two thirds of the film is undone by an extremely disappointing ending. After the studio went to unprecedented lengths to keep the ending from the public (delivering the final reel on the day of release), you might have been expecting something that would we devastatingly original but this is not the case in the slightest, far from it. The finale is as clichéd as it could possibly be, offering nothing new and in fact ruining the film. It is as lacklustre and as disappointing as it could be and only confirms that Robert De Niro isn’t really trying at all.

‘Hide and Seek’ is another Hollywood attempt at psychological horror that fails dismally. Only Dakota Fanning comes out of the film well as the rest of the cast, including Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue, Amy Irving and Dylan Baker are seriously underused and Robert De Niro is having a day off on screen. In fact in the words of Bananarama “Robert De Niro’s waiting…” for his career to take off again.

Jamie Kelwick

 

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