Shrouded in mystery and masqueraded as a bandwagon for socio-political right to privacy, Cache wears layers upon layers to hide what it really is at it’s core. It plays around with pseudo themes, building paper weight of deceptions on its heart and then half way through it, reveals itself for what it really is: an examination of memories, conscience and moralities in a decaying world.

Living a life centered on themselves, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are alienated married Persian couple dwelling in a posh locality in France. Lost in monotony, succumbed to schedule, the seemingly perfect relationship starts to crumble when one morning they find a static surveillance videotape which contains the recordings of their daily life. Fear boils inside them as panic grips like a vice by their throats as the frequency of the tapes increase. Haneke has masterfully hidden his true intentions within warped notions of privacy and that might be the most quintessential achievement of Cache.

There comes an essential moment when during a dinner night out, one of their colleague paraphrases a story from his memory. He plays around the events as suits him in his mind which then, becomes his eventual reality. This sequence feels a little out of place at first but as the narrative develops and the past comes knocking at the door of the couple, the realization of the masterful sequence hits. By the end of Cache, the anonymity of the stranger who was terrorizing the family holds such minimal significance that you are bound to be shocked at how far we have come from where we all began.

Michael Haneke plays with the minds as we never really know from whose perspective we are witnessing the events. He shuffles around the settings, eluding motives of the external threat and focuses upon the  family to look within themselves. It’s a clever directorial trick and Cache is a riveting thriller with intellectual depth of an ocean contained within it.

★★★★