Page 227

Hide And Seek Subhash K Jha

Movie Hide and Seek Director John Polson Producer Ari Schlossberg, Barry Josephson Cast Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning

By Subhash K Jha

Rating: ** To sum it up, the beginning is stunning, the middle is flabby and the ending is passable. That's how you feel after sitting through the latest de Niro flick. A supernatural horror thriller whose basic premise makes your hairs stand on�end, specially towards the end, Hide And Seek opens with an idyllic happy family scene in New York. Mom plays with Daughter as Dad watches on indulgently�Mom puts Daughter to sleep�Mom slashes her wrist in the bath tub. The shock of the moment lingers. And just when you begin to wonder about the vagaries of life and how they dominate your existence by playing hide and seek with your karma, director John Polosn quickly carts off papa de Niro and daughter Dakota Fanning to a place far away from the madding crowd. And then begins the film's unwieldy middle game, with characters bobbing menacingly into the plot's simmering cauldron, and then booling over in indigestible mounds. Swings creak, characters make sinister faces and the bleak countryside begins to look more foreboding than you're willing to take. By the time the plot draws to its showily violent conclusion �would it be proper to reveal the film's Big Secret?�you begin to wonder why Hollywood is so obsessed with para-normal experiences. Specially those involving little children?! Manoj Shyamalan did it with little Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. Now director John Polson (who three years ago made the cheesy stalker-film Swimfan) gets the equally intense Dakota Fanning to give a wonderfully involving performance as widower de Niro's intensely pained daughter. Fanning brings to the narrative a level of intensity that's perhaps lacking in the presentation on the whole. There's too much here that's frozen in the scheme of screams. For ostentatious effect the plot gives us characters ranging from the shady (a man who keeps knocking on de Niro's door for his daughter's attentions) to the disdainful (a sleepy -looking cop who drops in whenever the narrative needs to set off a siren as a wakeup call for the screenwriters and viewers). But the jolting effect that follows the little game lacks the timorous vivacity of other supernatural thrillers specially Secret Window where Johnny Depp did the betraying-the-audiences'-faith act with so much panache. De Niro's monstrous makeover suffers because of the script. Shock value is abundantly scattered. But the images stalking the scenario seem more manipulative and sensationalistic than credible and sensitive. Some of the later psychological subversions even seem a little crude, considering who leads the cast. Perhaps de Niro needs to choose his vehicles more carefully now than ever before. There's nothing wrong with the suspenseful manoeuvres of Hide And Seek. But at the end of it all you wonder if the 'split' personality theme applies to the audience.