HIDE AND SEEK
Mechanical thriller builds to predictable "surprise" ending

This occasionally effective but ultimately disappointing thriller plays like a throwback to the "mini-Hitchcock" movies that England's Hammer Films produced in the 1960s (e.g., SCREAM OF FEAR, PARANOIAC, MANIAC); that is (as David Pirie pointed out in his book A Heritage of Horror) the plot works so hard to provide an unguessable twist ending that the rest of the film winds up feeling like an extended prologue. This mechanical construction robs HIDE AND SEEK of any genuine impact, reminding us once again that the surprise ending of Hitchcock's PSYCHO works because, in retrospect, it is integral to the story.

The film gets off to a good start with Alison Callaway (Amy Irving) committing suicide in a bathtub full of blood-red water. Some time later, bereaved father David (Robert DeNiro) takes his traumatized daughter Emily (Dakota Fanning) away from her therapist (Famke Janssen) to a secluded house in the woods. (Why he thinks this would be good for her is the first unanswered question that ultimately leads viewers to guess the ending long before the film reveals it.)

Once in their new home, Emily starts talking about an imaginary friend named Charlie, who seems to act out her anger at her father for letting her mother die. Is Charlie, like Captain Howdy in THE EXORCIST, a harbinger of demonic possession? Is little Emily an ally of malevolent supernatural forces as in THE INNOCENTS (a clip from that 1960 classic appears in one of the deleted scenes on the HIDE AND SEEK DVD)? Or is Charlie a flesh-and-blood character -- and if so, who is he?

The problem with this guessing game is that the isolated setting does not leave room for many suspects. Consequently, each of the handful of locals who shows up is required to act suspicious; in particular, they all remark about how pretty Emily is, with almost pedophilic interest. The gambit backfires, because the creepy characters seem like projections of David's inner fears: it's almost like watching THE TRUMAN SHOW or THE GAME, wherein every character is "acting" a role for the benefit of the protagonist. This sense of contrived artificiality leads us to suspect that the whole film is just a hallucination in David's mind; although this turns out not to be the case, it still leads us to doubt his sanity -- which is not a good thing when you're trying to hide the identity of a psycho-killer. (In the DVD's audio commentary, screenwriter Ari Schlossberg admits that his original draft did indeed reveal that the neighbors were imaginary.)

When the film springs its belated revelation, the audience is well ahead. Worse, the twist undermines much of what proceeded. Once we know who Charlie is, all the suspicion the film has turned on Emily evaporates, absolving her of any complicity -- and yet the filmmakers seem not to grasp this fact, tagging the film with a weak epilogue that is supposed to leave the audience disturbed and concerned over the little girl's mental state.

DeNiro does what he can with his roll, but in spite of some dramatic pretensions the script subverts his character in order to generate cheap thrills. Fanning's spooky routine wears thin early on (she quickly becomes annoying rather than scary); in any case she turns out not to be the source of the horror, so why spend so much time focusing on her staring wide-eyed into the camera? Elisabeth Shue has a thankless roll as the love interest; the film completely ignores that she is much too young for DeNiro, then kills her off with the casual indifference of a cheap slasher film.

This wouldn't be so bad if the film were more upfront about its modest intentions; unfortunately, the story spends a lot of time pretending to be a serious, dramatic thriller about characters responding to traumatic events in their lives -- the kind of film that generates suspense by making you believe in the reality of the situation and making you care about the characters before putting them in jeopardy. This raises expectations that the film fails to satisfy, when it throws the drama out the window and goes for cheap shocks and surprises. With its slick production values and solid cast, HIDE AND SEEK cannot help generating a few scares, but by the end the misguided story-telling has undermined any attempt to create a solid, serious thriller.

DVD DETAILS

The widescreen DVD includes a making-of featurette; four alternate endings; several deleted scenes; three comparisons of storyboards to finished scenes; and audio commentary by director Polson, writer Schlossberg, and editor Jeffrey Ford, which plays under the film and the bonus material.

The behind-the-scenes featurette is fairly interesting, thanks mostly to the charming presence of Fanning; but like most DVD documentaries, it is essentially a fluffy promotional puff piece. Needless to say, the notoriously interview-averse DeNiro is nowhere to be seen in it.

The alternate endings reveal a terminal cluelessness on the part of the filmmakers, who wanted to end the movie with a CARRIE-type sting (e.g., Emily winds up in a mental institution, still playing hide-and-seek with an imaginary friend). They seem somewhat surprised that test screenings revealed that viewers felt sorry for the little girl and wanted a more upbeat ending after all the horror she survives. (Why this should surprise them is unclear: the film itself toys with making Emily as the source of fear, but the twist ending clearly turns her into a victim -- so why wouldn't audience want some sense of respite for her at the end?)

The deleted scenes are pretty much trivial stuff that duplicates beats in the movie, without advancing the story in any interesting way. In spite of this, the audio commentary continually insists on how good the scenes are ("I like this scene," "There's nothing wrong with this scene," etc), expressing regret that they had to be removed to speed up pacing; at least director Polson seems aware that many of the scenes were redundant.

The Previs scenes compare three sequences, as they were storyboarded and as they were filmed. Two were intended to be longer in the planning stages, while the third was extended in order to goose up the thrills at the climax. One of the longer storyboards reveals that there was some initial (if ultimately abandoned) concern that the thriller element had shunted aside the dramatic story of the father and his daughter: the extended version was an attempt to add a final emotional beat that was resolve that forgotten aspect of the plot; alas, it was dropped.

Overall, the audio commentary is not as informative as one would wish. There is a great deal of back-slapping congratulation that really is not warranted by the film ("I love that scene"); oftentimes, they project elements onto the film that are not actually there; and much of their discussion wanders into generalities (like working with DeNiro) instead of focusing on the actual scenes playing out on screen.

Occasionally, when the group does get around to discussing the film itself, they reveal a few telling details. Polson talks a bit about the "science" of dissociative personality disorder but seems quite proud that none of this explanation is in the actual film, and Schlossberg cites "creative license" as his excuse for not explaining how "Charlie" came to be.

Perhaps the most revealing moment comes when Polson says, "The more we make DeNiro's character feel like there's a threat outside the house, the less likely we are to point the finger at him." What makes this interesting is that, elsewhere in the commentary, the director seems well aware that some cynical viewers will get suspicious when the film points them too strongly in one direction. Too bad he never realized that the strained attempt to point out attention away from David had the reverse effect.