Hide and Seek - DVD Review

A plea to all thriller/horror writers - the more you try to copy The Sixth Sense, the better you make it look. So many writers are trying to ape Shyamalan's creepy atmosphere and then tacking on a twist ending, without realizing that Sixth Sense was a complete film, from beginning to end. Is there a better argument for how much these films are just throwing darts at a board with different twist endings than the fact that the new DVD of Hide and Seek currently has five to choose from? You can even choose the ending you want before you start watching the film. Imagine a book with five different final pages. Pick one before you start reading. That's not a script, it's just a game.

If Hide and Seek, the tale of a father & daughter trying to recover from the death of their wife/mother (with a lot of creepy stuff thrown in), is purely a game, than you could do a lot worse for players than Robert Deniro and Dakota Fanning. As her character, Emily gets weirder and weirder, Fanning does a good job with the "creepy kid" stuff and Deniro ably handles the concerned-but-detached father role. But the film sells them out. Without spoiling anything, Hide and Seek pretends to care about its characters but any emotional investment the film may earn with you will be corrupted by the end.

And that's the biggest problem with the current Shyamalan wannabes. The Sixth Sense and Hide and Seek are basically character studies with creepy elements. The twist at the end of Sixth enriches that study and works perfectly on repeat viewing. The twist at the end of Hide and Seek subverts anything that you may have invested in the characters to that point and creates plot holes big enough to make repeat viewing a joke. This is a film that uses suicide, child development, parenthood, and mental illness as twists and turns, not for any true character depth or even good scares.

The amazing thing about Hide and Seek, and the truly unforgivable one, is that it's just not scary. Much can be forgiven when it comes to false twists and unbelievable characters, if you have goosebumps on your arms when you watch it. But Hide and Seek pretends to be mostly a character study, so it doesn't even give you the typical jumps of the genre. In other words, if you're looking for a good scare on a lonely night, this isn't the one for you. Instead of writing a thriller or a horror flick or a character study, Ari Schlossberg tried to have it all and then twist you into liking it with a surprise ending, but it just feels false. Hide and seek takes at least two players. Don't play along. Let this one stay hidden.