My Delayed Pretentious Appreciation of the Film Cache Which Was Originally Titled Hidden for Cannes. Hidden is the Better Title.

Last weekend I saw the French thriller Cache starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as a husband in wife in a seemingly idyllic life. He hosts a roundtable book review TV show. She works with a publisher. They live the good life with good education, high profile jobs, and security. That is until a video tape is left on their doorstep. The video tape is simply of the front of their apartment. It shows people walking by and them leaving. Simple but creepy, really creepy. They are being watched and they don’t know who or why. Then more video tapes begin to arrive that point to a secret from the husband’s childhood. The husband then begins to use clues in the tapes to hunt down the person sending the tapes. His hunt though leads to the fracturing of what was a good life and marriage. That’s all I’m going to tell of the plot in order to not ruin anything.

I went because reading the first paragraphs of some reviews it seemed right up my alley. Juliette Binoche in a Hitchcockian thriller? I’m there. Perhaps I should have paid attention to the “French” part, because I obviously didn’t get into the right frame of mind to enjoy it. I left feeling bored by the whole event. Sure there were some chills and a couple of interesting twists, but it seemed so stagnant almost too precise in its direction. There was too much ambiguity. I could understand why critics loved it, but I couldn’t. Then I drove home.

Driving back to LB from Santa Monica, I started processing the movie. That’s when the full creepiness of the film hit me. Since then, I’ve still been trying to put the pieces together. But with what’s given in the film it’s impossible to put the pieces together. If you go to see this movie I think you should know there is no resolution. That’s the haunting brilliance of this film that I am just now appreciating. If a film can keep me thinking about it days after I saw it, then I can’t help but recommend it. It is though not for everyone.