Caché (2005)
Directed by Michael Haneke
As the host of a literary TV show, Georges begins receiving anonymously filmed videos of his family alongside cryptic, disturbing drawings, but as the tapes become increasingly intimate, they reveal a stalker who has known him for a very long time.
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11 films that influenced Caché
What critics say influenced Caché
Watching Caché feels like an exercise in seeing, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s movies of the ’60s and ’70s, especially Blow Up and the amazing climax of The Passenger, where important details seem hidden in the picture if only we knew where to look.
Interestingly, this is the very opposite of the message of John Sayles' masterpiece, "Lone Star," which told us that, at a certain point, one has to chuck the guilt one inherits and get on with things.
It's Death Wish, only with the polarities reversed.
Their closed, shut-off life is disturbed when they receive mysterious video tapes at their doorsteps, showing footage of their house being filmed by an unknown cameraman (believe it or not, this film pre-dates Michael Haneke’s Cache).
David Lynch's "Lost Highway," for example, opened strongly with Bill Pullman's character finding a recording of the inside of his house and then, later, clandestine footage of him killing his wife!
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Be warned that the movie is also a bit of a shaggy-dog story in the tradition of such open-ended mysteries as "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive."
The director has explored societal issues before in such films as "Funny Games," "Code Unknown" and "The Time of the Wolf," and he has also used video as a psychological tool in the early "Benny's Video," but never before has he so skillfully made a statement.
In Benny's Video, a teenage boy lures a young girl into his family's apartment and kills her with a stun gun.
Those who've experienced the piercing disturbances of Haneke's recent work, particularly ''Code Unknown" and the cruelly overlooked apocalypse parable ''Time of the Wolf," know that the provocations here will reach into the political.
The director has explored societal issues before in such films as "Funny Games," "Code Unknown" and "The Time of the Wolf," and he has also used video as a psychological tool in the early "Benny's Video," but never before has he so skillfully made a statement.
Some of his recent films include The Time of the Wolf, The Pianist, Code Unknown, and Funny Games â all of which reveal Hanekeâs vision of the human condition as a struggle against random obstacles and the negation of our complicity with those who oppress us.
In Code Unknown , he dealt with a group of people in Paris trying to cope with the exigencies of modern life, where predators and victims of hate abound.
In Code Unknown, an Arab youth dresses down a pretty stranger, then spits in her face.
Here is a roundup of Haneke's career thus far: In The Seventh Continent, a middle-class family smashes their material possessions, flushes wads of money down the toilet, then commits group suicide.
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Michael Haneke, the art house-beloved German director probably best-known for Funny Games and Caché , has something of a reputation as a provocateur (probably because of... Funny Games and Caché) that he doesn't quite deserve.
Writer/director Michael Haneke (2001's "The Piano Teacher") has deliberately left much of the film up to individual interpretation.
As he revealed in "The Piano Teacher," Haneke is a master at delineating obsessive behavior, as represented by the videographer, and its consequences.
Writer/director Michael Haneke ("The Piano Teacher," "The Time of the Wolf") delivers his most stunning work to date with this insidious thriller about race and privilege and the black secrets carried by those we least suspect.
Recently named Best Foreign Language Film by the Chicago Film Critics Association, this quietly insidious thriller from Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke ("The Piano Teacher") is haunting in a subversive, real-world way one that's far more powerful than splatter schlock such as "Hostel" or "Wolf Creek."
A slice-of-life ensemble piece, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, is built around a killing spree.