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Caché has tremendous potential, mostly because it is so well executed. But that potential is wasted on a weak premise and lazy plotting.
Writer-director Haneke broaches a terrifying and important subject – France’s immense debt to its colonial subjects, abroad and at home – but laying the blame at the feet of a six year-old is a grotesque deflection. The boy’s parents did the deed as only adults could. With its dream sequences and deus ex machina videos and drawings, Haneke focuses on the return of the repressed but it’s the expression of immorality which, in our day and age, deserves greater scrutiny.
Every polity has immoral impulses but they’re moot without bad policies and politics. Had the script devoted more attention to its implicit inter-generational conflicts, it could have traced the psychological forces at work to their cultural roots. That would be a great murder mystery to solve.