This Peek-a-Boo is a boo-boo

HIDE AND SEEK (2005)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
(Originally reviewed in 2006)

When a new movie arrives in theaters that stars Robert De Niro, I get a little excited. After all, De Niro is one of our great actors, a man who gave us many inspired, complex performances. So for him to appear in a horror thriller, it is exciting news. The news, unfortunately, is precisely where the excitement ends.

De Niro plays a psychologist named David who has just suffered a tremendous loss - his wife (Amy Irving) has committed suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. Now he has to console himself and his young daughter, Emily (Dakota Fanning), so they move upstate from all the noise and chaos of New York City. This is seen as a hindrance to Emily by David's close friend and colleague (Famke Janssen) but hey, David feels the openness of country living might be therapeutic. So much for that idea. Before you know it, Emily starts exhibiting odd behaviors. She claims to have an imaginary friend named "Charlie," she dresses in a black dress for dinner, she visits a cave where she deposits dolls she destroys, she uses a bug as fish bait, shall I go on? Naturally she is hesitant to accept anyone new in her father's life, including Elizabeth (Elisabeth Shue), so Emily's behavior may be symptomatic of all that.

But then, a drowned cat is found in the bathtub and, twice, words are sprawled across the bathroom walls that serve as ominous warnings. Is "Charlie" the culprit? If so, how can David stop it? And if a cat drowns in your bathtub and you suspect your daughter is responsible, then wouldn't you consider taking your daughter out of the country setting and seek professional help? The plot thickens.

All this leads to the inevitable surprise ending, which will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read good mystery novels and is a film buff. The problem with "Hide and Seek" is that after a remarkably solid thirty minutes, it slides into the trite and bleak world of nothingness and emptiness. In other words, the filmmakers decide to abandon the two strong characters of Emily and David and subject them to pointless thrills and chills that ride high on the implausibility meter. This leads to more pointless scenes of David's neighbors, David's extremely brief fling with Elizabeth (and their initial encounter has got to be the speediest request for a date ever), endless scenes of David wandering the hallways and basement of his house, the cliched teapot hissing, etc.

De Niro handles the task of playing a bespectacled psychologist respectably but that is because he is Robert De Niro - unfortunately, he barely tries. He inhabits the role in a dreamlike state with no inner tension. Anyone could have played this role and that is not true of De Niro's other incarnations such as Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta. On the De Niro meter of bad films, this is far better than "The Fan" or the dreadful and painful "Meet the Fockers" but that isn't saying much.

Dakota Fanning has the right look as the big-eyed, pale Child of the Damned, or so it seems (she looks like she could be in a remake of "The Bad Seed"). Save for the occasional smile, this kid could grow up to be a Stepford wife - an emotionless doll. I understand that her Emily character is upset over her mother's death but Fanning appears geared to be in a goth rock band.

The last half-hour of "Hide and Seek" is so incongruous to the rest of the story that I felt cheated and hoodwinked, but not in a good way. I always say that the only director who can come up with a surprise ending is David Lynch because he works in the logic of a dream. To a certain extent, it is difficult to surprise an audience when we've seen most surprise endings by now. "Hide and Seek" seems to be heading in the direction of nightmare or dreamlike logic but it goes for broke, culminating in an ending that one can see miles away since no other logical conclusion is possible. The biggest insult is how one movie can make Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning and poor Elisabeth Shue so damn enervated. Now that's surprising.