Metacritic reviews

This brilliantly disturbing movie is constructed with surgical precision. Haneke lets no one off the hook least of all the viewer.

We the viewers are its beneficiaries, watching and waiting for something awful to happen. Here it does, first subtly, then spectacularly. The twist is not revealed until the last shot--if you keep your avid eyes open.

A tightly plotted and paced thriller whose not-so-hidden agenda is to expose the bad conscience of the world's haves toward its have-nots, "Hidden" is one of Austrian helmer Michael Haneke's most watchable and pungent works.

The picture moves with stealth, enjoying its own thriller-ness as hints are laid and mislaid. There's a sense that Hitchcock is hovering in the background and cheering for Auteuil, who musters all his French superstardom to play a man having his mask of blandness torn off.

Haneke echoes the theme of Hitchcock's "Rear Window": Moviemaking is basically an act of voyeurism. We secretly examine people's lives in every movie. But in this one, there is a hidden camera, a movie within the movie as it were, forcing us to observe a character along side a mysterious stranger.

Binoche and Auteuil are both quietly sensational in their fracturing personae, but the film is Haneke's premier postmodern assault--less visceral, perhaps, than "Code Unknown" and the criminally underappreciated "Time of the Wolf," but more thoughtful and, in the end, deeper in the afterplay.

This brilliant if unpleasant puzzle without a solution about surveillance and various kinds of denial finds writer-director Michael Haneke near the top of his game, though it's not a game everyone will want to play.

On a deeper level, Haneke tries to reach for political allegory on the French-Algerian War, but the film functions best as a perfectly calibrated thriller, perhaps his most accessible to date.

The eerily timely subject of Haneke's film is France's unwilling encounter with the disenfranchised minorities it has tried to sweep under the rug. As one who giggled through his widely admired, irredeemably silly "The Piano Teacher," I wasn't prepared to be easily won over by Caché, but it turns out to be his most human and affecting movie to date.

To some degree, “Hidden” is a cat-and-mouse thriller, the only problem being that mouse and cat insist on swapping roles.