Review of Hide and Seek (2005) by Michael H — 22 Feb 2015

"Hide and Seek" is ambitious, not to say shameless, in its appropriation of incidents and atmosphere from earlier horror movies. The devil-child aspect of the film recalls the "Omen" pictures. The child-stalking elements hark back to "The Night of the Hunter." Some of the queasy sexual overtones (as when Emily tells her father that Charlie says he could have satisfied her mother better than David did) are unpleasant in a plainly "Exorcist" sort of way. And there's Psycho all over the place: flung-back shower curtains, a flashing butcher knife, a sinister staircase, a doomed flatfoot. (At one point someone actually says, "He's harmless, really. He wouldn't hurt a fly.") And if you thought you would never again find yourself sitting in a theater thinking, "No, no, don't go down into that dark, dripping basement," you were wrong.

The picture doesn't have much in the way of psychological resonance: you're not likely to go home afterwards and ponder its deeper meaning.