No need to seek.
Any scary wintertime edge-of-the-seat offering that's currently doing roughly eighteen squillion dollars of business at the box office and starring Robert De Niro can't be all bad, right?
Hide and Seek
is largely based on the premise that some things are just inherently creepy: porcelain dolls, tinkly music boxes with revolving ballerinas, small New England
***image1***
villages and doors swinging creakily to and fro-to say nothing of little girls with wide unblinking eyes who whisper weird prophetic utterances. And 10-year-old Emily Callaway (Dakota Fanning) has good reason to behave oddly; her mother having recently committed suicide, her psychologist father David (De Niro) decides to uproot her from their New York home and, but of course, move upstate to an isolated small town, replete with odd locals (particularly the wonderfully freaky Dylan Baker as the sheriff). Emily begins acting more and more strangely, poking out the eyes of all her dolls, dressing gothically in her dead mom's togs and just generally giving Linda Blair a run for her money, until one day she announces that she has a new friend: Charlie, who's apparently imaginary-or is he, nudge nudge. David believes this innovation to be therapeutic until various unwholesome events ascribed to Charlie (gory accusations on the bathroom walls! the ghoulish fate of the family pussycat! and so forth) become too wack for even him to ignore. Is Charlie some kind of supernatural phenom, or has little Emily's cheese slid off her cracker?
It pains me to admit this, but Fanning really is remarkable; her prematurely aged face is merciless and unreachable, and her venomous contempt for the stupidity of the adults around her effectively
***image2***
reduces them to blundering and flailing. Fanning steals every scene right out from underneath De Niro, and it becomes easier all the time to forget that he was ever in anything but
Meet the Fockers
(
Heat
?
Goodfellas
?
Raging Bull
? oh never mind). While Emily has the baleful stare of Bette Davis, scraping her teeth evilly across her fork during dinner scenes, her father's so ineffectual he can't even open a window, retreating into the well-wadded language of psychiatry (including one line so mind-bogglingly awful it apparently deserves repeating, since it turns up twice: "trauma causes pain"-don't think about that one too long).
Unfortunately, for all of the acting talent on display,
Hide and Seek
devolves rapidly from a promising horror movie into a silly thriller, featuring only one or two genuinely chilling moments before its regrettably predictable conclusion.
