Well-chilled French thriller comparable in degrees centigrade to Time Out, With a Friend Like Harry, Merci pour le Chocolat, Red Lights, et al. An anonymous videocassette in a plastic bag is left without explanation at the doorstep of the civilized host of a book-chat TV show: a two-hour static surveillance shot of the front of the house where he lives with his wife and their twelve-year-old son. A similar second tape, night-time, follows, accompanied by a childish drawing of a figure with blood streaming from the mouth. You can readily imagine, inasmuch as you are put snugly in the shoes of the protagonist, how this might give you the willies. An additional drawing, later, of a bloody chicken and additional surveillance tape of his boyhood home in the country, where now his mother alone resides, would seem to point the finger at an Algerian immigrant, a long-ago playmate of the protagonist, whom the latter's parents had once planned to adopt. There's a story there, a story hidden, a deep dark secret from the past, unknown even to the wife. The measured disclosure of it is as much a test of patience as a test of nerve. The austere Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke lowers the temperature a few degrees nearer the deep freeze, even, than the French ideal. He gets unostentatious fine performances from Daniel Auteuil and a thicker-in-the-middle Juliette Binoche, and it's always good to see the venerable Annie Girardot (the mother in the country). He avails himself of no mood-setting background music, staying alert to ambient sound only, maintaining the stillness of a stalker, a voyeur. His spookily empty images, not just the ones borrowed from the surveillance camera, possess something of the expectancy, the pregnancy, of the early-20th-century photographs of Eugène Atget. And the unsettling final shot, outside the school of the twelve-year-old, is a stimulating discussion-starter for viewers whose curiosity rises above "Huh?" Answer this: whose point of view? (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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