London Film Festival 2005

A Haneke film is never going to be a nice, leisurely, comfortable
ride, and this one lives up to all expectations.

'Hidden' is intriguing and disturbing film, from an extraordinary
filmmaker. As well as leaving you with one basic plot query - and it
is guaranteed you will be asking it, when of course it's the wrong
query! - it poses many more important questions: in Haneke's
cinematic world you are constantly wrong-footed and forced to face
moral and metaphysical ambiguities.

As a viewer, there is a strange process you undergo of dislocation
from life's casual certainties, mirrored by the complex dislocations
in the film itself. You are frequently unsure whether you are
watching something within the timeframe of the scene itself, or a
previous timeframe replayed. Then there are the sudden and sometimes
shocking cuts between scenes, or, without any warning, the violent
change of direction within a scene.

The living room of the protagonists' house has cosy book lined
walls - all those neatly packaged and filed ideas - and it is this
world that is under threat, from an unknown source. Haneke manages
to make this threat not only a complex and powerful metaphor, but
draws the viewer in, so that it is a danger we can almost touch, and
even something we are obscurely complicit in. Who is the
mysterious 'watcher'? Perhaps, in some sense, we the audience?

http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0387898/combined