Critics reviews

Binoche’s boldness provides Anne with a level of importance and insight that is not present in Haneke’s words and scenario, existing only on the screen in Binoche’s incarnation.

Mr. Haneke is an Austrian often working in France, and his outsider status affords him a particularly harsh vantage. "Caché," like "Code Unknown," his film from 2000, is obliquely about the sins of French complacency. Its terror works as an existential mystery and, in its great final closing-credit sequence, something more conspiratorial and timely: Failure to reckon with the past allows a future generation to do the reckoning for itself.

Often, a television set does not frame a tape, but Haneke's camera occasionally pulls back to reveal Georges and Anne watching it on their TV. Due to the frequent lack of framing and other devices, the viewer questions who captures what and why. With CACHE, Haneke constructs a film in which we distrust him, and ultimately ourselves. Does an image hide its meaning from us? For Haneke, we must find what we hide from ourselves to see the world around us.

If there is a key to this film, it lies more in what is not said than what is.

Mr. Haneke's lacerating film powerfully demonstrates how the free-floating anxiety of our age attaches itself to all aspects of our lives.

Where other thriller or horror directors constantly build and release tension at regular intervals, Haneke just keeps on slowly ratcheting up the stakes until the movie snaps like a rubber band, quick and stinging.

Binoche and Auteuil are both quietly sensational in their fracturing personae, but the film is Haneke's premier postmodern assault.

Michael Haneke's latest offering, Caché brilliantly converges towards early Harun Farocki themes of surveillance and terrorism though images while retaining his own recurring themes on the abstraction of videoimage representation.