Hide and Seek - You can't hide

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Movie
German title Hide and Seek - You can't hide
Original title Hide and Seek
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2005
length 101 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 16
Rod
Director John Polson
script Ari Schlossberg
production Barry Josephson
music John Ottman
camera Dariusz Wolski
cut Jeffrey Ford
occupation

Hide and Seek - You can not hide (original title: Hide and Seek , English for "hide and seek") is a thriller by John Polson from 2005. Robert De Niro plays the leading role .

action

At the beginning, the viewer is shown the apparently harmonious family life of psychologist David Callaway, his wife Alison and their daughter Emily. However, there are already slight tensions between the parents, as David is obviously mostly busy with his work for too long. Alison puts the daughter to bed after a brief game of hide-and-seek and then both of them go to sleep.

David Callaway wakes up in the middle of the night. His wife is not in bed and he hears a drop from the faucet in the bathroom, and a light shines through the ajar door. He enters the bathroom and finds his wife. She lies dead behind the shower curtain in blood-soaked water in the bathtub, surrounded by burning candles. At that moment, Emily also enters the bathroom.

Emily is clearly traumatized after her mother's suicide . She hardly speaks to her father, seems apathetic and obviously ignores again and again when he says something, or forces him to speak to her several times until she reacts. Contrary to the advice of their psychologist friend Katherine, who has a very close relationship with Emily, they move from their old apartment in New York to the countryside.

Emily's condition does not improve, however. She tells of her imaginary boyfriend named Charlie, who seems to get more and more brutal over time. Meanwhile, David is plagued by nightmares. He sees scenes of his wife at a past dinner party and finally wakes up completely sweaty. Again, there is a light on in the bathroom, which has a similar effect. Behind the shower curtain David finds a kind of shrine made of burning candles and the message written on the wall with crayons: "You let her die".

When David meets Elizabeth, a divorced woman who lives with her sister and looks after her niece, Emily becomes jealous and angry. Eventually David finds her cat drowned in the bathtub. Emily repeatedly asserts that Charlie is responsible for these acts.

When Elizabeth visits the Callaways, she runs into Emily, who tells her she would play hide and seek with Charlie. When Elizabeth opens the closet door, Charlie throws her through the window of the room and rushes into the courtyard.

Some time later, David wakes up in the house. He notices the broken window of the almost petrified Emily. Before he can find out anything, he gets a visit from the sheriff, who is looking for Elizabeth and has found her empty car. After the sheriff leaves, David finds Elizabeth's body in the bathtub between candles and another message.

In a panic, David runs through the house in search of the killer. In his office he finally finds all of his work utensils neatly packed in boxes, which finally makes him aware that he is Charlie himself - a second personality of himself. This is where the secret to the recurring nightmare is revealed: David has his wife up watched the adultery at the dinner party, later suffocating her in her marriage bed and staging the suicide.

From that moment on, Charlie takes complete control of David. He gets Emily to lure the sheriff into a trap. Katherine, worried about a phone call from Emily, is also overwhelmed by David. He pushes her into the basement and locks her up with the seriously injured sheriff. Katherine manages to free herself and shoots David with the policeman's gun before he can harm Emily, who has since been hiding in a nearby cave.

The film ends with Emily with her new foster mother Katherine and Emily paints a picture of her and Katherine holding hands. When the two leave the house, the picture is shown again, but this time Emily has not one, but two heads.

Alternative endings

In addition to the ending shown in the theatrical version, other final scenes were filmed that appeared on DVD . When the film was broadcast on ORF and RTL , this ending was shown in a shortened version: Katherine puts Emily to bed. When Katherine leaves, Emily asks to leave the door open. However, Katherine replies that she is not allowed to. When Katherine locks the door, one notices a window in the door that is typical for closed institutions . Emily is Katherine's patient and receives psychiatric care from her. In the corridor, she speaks to an employee that she will be back the following day and that she will not give up on the girl.

Another alternative ending shows the drawing as in the original ending, with the difference that Emily only has one head.

In the third alternative ending, Emily is put to bed. After Katherine leaves the room, Emily plays hide and seek again. She walks slowly to the closet, opens it and says to her own reflection in the mirror: "There you are!"

Reviews

“Atmospheric, intelligently staged thriller. Despite the impressive main actors and good image and sound direction, the plot gets lost in illogical breaks and conventions in the long run. "

- Lexicon of international film

“The clumsiness of the Polson / Schlossberg double is also evident when laying the wrong tracks. They can be seen so clearly that they can never lead to the murderer. This mallet filigree characterizes the whole film. "

- Carsten Baumgardt, filmstarts.de

“According to the usual pattern with many exaggerated moments of shock, a badly constructed solution is conjured out of the hat towards the end, for which - similar to The Sixth Sense  - there are already many hints. John Polson ( Siam Sunset , Swimfan ) staged a mystery thriller that can only astonish absolute amateurs. "

- Prisma-Online.de

Others

The production budget is put at 25 million US dollars. Worldwide revenue was around $ 123 million. In the USA almost 8 million moviegoers were counted in the year of publication, in Europe it was around 4 million.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Hide & Seek - You cannot hide . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , April 2005 (PDF; test number: 101 378-a K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for Hide and Seek - You can't hide . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Hide and Seek - You can't hide. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  4. ↑ complete review on filmstarts.de
  5. ↑ Complete review on prisma-online.de
  6. ↑ http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Hide-and-Seek#tab=summary
  7. ^ Lumiere film database