CACHE (2005)

The first hour of Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s deep-think thriller merges Antonioni’s nihilistic art-house mystery chic with Hitchcockian guilt-tinged populist suspense; it's THE MAN WHO DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH . . . ABOUT HIMSELF! Daniel Auteuil is superb, at once restrained & OTT, as an upper middle-class liberal who slowly gives in to his baser instincts when he finds his family targeted via some unfathomable video surveillance. (Sam Peckinpah's violent core instincts, think STRAW DOGS, aren't far off, nor the tone of indefinable Pinteresque menace; bourgeoisie of the world unite! - you have nothing to lose but your fear & loathing! Antonioni, Hitch, Peckinpah, Pinter; Haneke's overloaded & over-referenced.) Maintaining the conceit of unknowable threat proves unwieldy, especially with Haneke stuffing his enigmatic fable with political currents and psychological hooks that lose much of their power when played as ‘text’ rather than sub-text. Still, his chilly restraint behind the camera is almost as compelling as the insidious workings of his unnamed videographers.