Review of Caché (2005) by Chris V — 04 Aug 2008

A pretty profound disappointment. I was naturally a big admirer of director Michael Haneke's Funny Games, so I approached this one -- a critically acclaimed French-language film from a couple years back -- with some anticipation. What I got was a movie that, for a good hour or so, felt like it was going to be fantastic. The deeply flawed second half, however, somehow manages to nonchalantly throw away everything that made the first half so intriguing; in doing so, it inadvertently (or purposefully?) shifts the entire focus of the movie. The film's central mystery (who's filming their house and sending them the creepy tapes? -- I want to know, dammit!) gets brushed aside in favor of a far less interesting guilty-past story, and the piece suffers dramatically for it.

I suppose Haneke considers himself an artiste who finds story and character unimportant if there's a message to be had. That approach worked beautifully in Funny Games, but here I'm not even really sure what he's getting at. It's certainly a well-made film, but it's unsatisfying, overlong, and incredibly frustrating. Mabye it's meant to be all three, who knows (Haneke likes screwing with his audiences, after all), but I happen to count all of those as bad things.