Hide and Seek

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Rated R

~A film with a split personality~

By Todd Karella
January 28, 2005

While the film is being portrayed as a horror flick with some supernatural creature, dubbed Charlie, terrorizing a young girl and her father, it has the feel of a poorly done M. Night Shyamalan film where all these subtle clues throughout are supposed to come together to reveal something totally unexpected.

Emily Callaway (Fanning) is the daughter of two loving parents, David (De Niro) and Alison (Amy Irving). Mother and daughter have a special bond and life is good. Then one night David awakens to find Alison missing from bed. Walking into the bathroom he finds that she has committed suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub.
Poor Emily is traumatized from seeing her mother's body and her father, who is also a psychiatrist, decides that the best thing for them is a change of venue. Against the advice of Katherine (Famke Janssen), his trusted colleague he decides to move to the country.
Upon their arrival Emily makes a new friend, Charlie. Nobody has seen her new friend and they decide to dismiss him as an obvious imaginary friend, something quite common for children who have experienced great trauma to conjure up.
As soon as the imaginary friend arrives, strange things begin to happen. Emily's dolls end up missing and mutilated, while doors and windows are mysteriously left open. When confronted about these issues, her only response is that Charlie did it.

David tries to reach his daughter, but everything he does seems to push her farther away. When he finds her a play friend, Emily frightens her away by showing her that dolls don't mind losing an eye to a pair of scissors.
   While Emily is finding it hard to play nice, David is finding it a much easier task as he begins to fall for the girl's aunt Elizabeth (Shue).
   Charlie doesn't like him finding a new replacement for his deceased wife and begins to leave messages for him. Not happy, friendly little messages, but ones written in blood on the shower curtains in the middle of the night.
   Immediately, David is worried about how his daughter is acting out but still refuses to take her back to the city to see her doctor. He still believes that he can treat her condition better than her own doctor.

He is very wrong in his assumption as things continue to escalate Not only is the writing on the shower curtain continuing, but he finds the cat dead in the bottom of the bathtub. Burying the animal in the yard and trying to play it off as something he can help his daughter with, does nothing to solve the problem.
   It gets worse when Elizabeth shows up at the house and finds Emily and Charlie playing Hide and Seek. David is busy writing in his study and isn't even aware that she was at the house until a police officer shows up at the door looking for her.
After the officer leaves, he finds Emily's bedroom window shattered and Elizabeth dead in the bathtub. David begins to panic as he realizes Emily could not have done that by herself and blames the creepy next door neighbor.
   At this point the shocking revelation is revealed and finally we know who or what Charlie really is. A number of the films previous scenes are replayed, but this time as they really happened.
   This would have been a good point for the film to end, but instead it drags on for another half hour as Charlie goes on a killing frenzy and chases Emily around for the rest of the film.
   While not one of the year's best films, it's worth seeing, but probably not until it comes out on DVD.

It would have been a much more interesting movie if it had managed to accomplish what it was trying to do. Unfortunately, the clues that it gives are either false, because the scene never really happened, or completely disjointed with events that don't link up.
Along with the unseen twist, the film would have made a much better impact if it had ended with the twist as a surprise ending. Instead it becomes a slasher film as whoever or whatever Charlie really is goes on a killing spree.
Even with its flaws, the film is entertaining, helped by good performances from Robert De Niro, Elisabeth Shue, and a particularly creepy Dakota Fanning.