Review of Caché (2005) by Mjs M — 25 Dec 2009

This is a film that failed to blow my mind the first time I saw it, but I was watching it in less than perfect circumstances and I wanted to give it another shot. This time around I think I appreciated it a lot more.

Firstly I think I got a lot more out of the film?s political undertones. There?s definitely a very smart message about how white privilege can lead people to a callous disregard for the suffering of those who are unlike themselves and for how society reacts to the guilt of past racial transgressions through denial.

Stylistically, I?m a bit more mixed. Haneke is certainly able to set a really strong tone of dread with his long takes and smash cuts, but the downside to this is that the movie is cold as hell. The DVD case proclaims a kinship between Haneke and Hitchcock but he?s really a hell of a lot closer to Kubrick.

Cold can be a good decision but it can also have a fairly disengaging effect to it, the style is so detached from the main character that I found it a bit harder to care about the main character than was probably for the best.

Still, there?s a ton of stuff to respect here.