Hide and Seek (2005)

Hide and Seek arrives from 2005, a year when a psychological thriller could still be built on a dead cat in a bathtub and a child who speaks for an imaginary friend named Charlie. Robert De Niro plays a grieving psychologist who moves his daughter Emily, played by Dakota Fanning with unnerving composure, to a house upstate. The house has a closet. The closet has secrets. The secrets have a body count. Director John Polson keeps the machinery running, though the machinery is mostly a door creaking and Fanning staring at nothing.

The film's cultural ledger is remarkably blank. The cast is white, the villain is psychological, and no character pauses to explain the social order. Dissociative identity disorder appears here as a plot device and a final scare, a twist to be revealed in the last reel, not a condition to be understood or affirmed. The daughter's two-headed drawing closes the film on a note of dread, which is where the film wants to leave us. Nobody learns anything. Nobody grows.

There is no lecture, no sermon, no moment where a character turns to the camera to instruct us on how to live. The film concerns itself with grief, rage, and the inconvenience of an imaginary friend who kills the neighbors. That is its entire ambition. The result is a thriller that critics found derivative and audiences found tolerable, and which now sits quietly in the catalogue, offending no one and instructing no one. On the scale of modern social consciousness it reads as an artifact from another era, preserved in amber, harmless, mostly forgotten. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds nothing, and moves on to the next bottle.

In the end, the film is a period piece without knowing it, a relic of a moment when a horror movie could simply try to scare people and be judged on whether it succeeded. It did not succeed especially well. But it did not lecture, and for that, the ledger stays clean.

{"thematic_tags": ["box_office_number_one"]}