Suspense In Michael Haneke's Cache

Michael Haneke 's 'Cache ' is a suspense thriller that creates angst and apprehension within the at-home viewer, and leads to their stiff and strained state of mind throughout. It follows the story of a married couple who are menaced by a series of surveillance tapes left in the exterior of their residence from an anonymous source. The mystery, of course, involves the identity of the person or persons sending the videos which disrupt the bourgeois routine of a Parisian family. The film explores what happens when educated member of the Parisian elite (Georges Laurent) is confronted with a traumatic event from his childhood. This film is great at eliciting emotion and ultimately creating suspense among its audience. It does so in a way in which

From this establishing shot, a number of notable features and hallmarks of the film contributed to the creation of suspense. The films use of VHS here, as opposed to HD, conveys the subject here in a pragmatic fashion. It appears as more of a documentary than a fiction story from the outset. A defining characteristic of this CCTV aesthetic is its poor image quality. Haneke’s decision to use digital cameras for the whole of Caché replicates this low-tech style. This combined with the film 's natural sounds of chirping birds, murmurs and street sounds and lack of music proved the film 's attention to the creation of a realistic picture. We are constantly being converted to a realist agenda by the film 's use of natural lighting as much as it can (excluding outdoor scenes), creating a naturalist piece. It is displayed that we cannot trust the image as a guarantor of truth as we are shown that it is, in fact, Georges and Anne reviewing this surveillance themselves in their living area. The verbal projection of Georges’s and Anne’s conversation over previously filmed surveillance footage in the first scene both undoes temporal consistency, overlaying present sound onto past image, and also suggests their lack of internal coherence. This

The last scene, very subtly, shows Pierrot interacting with Majid 's son, suggesting that they plotted the whole thing. Even at our most attentive, when things are directly in front of our eyes, it displays how easy it is to miss life 's subtle giveaways. in a larger context, one may wonder if this a call to both France and Algeria to deal with the past and move forward together. The simplicity of the dialogue and surface plot serves as only a shallow reflection of life atop a much deeper and mired tale further complicated by the perplexing emotions of guilt, shame and regret. The fact that the film ends with no definite conclusion only further facilitates the already dominant sense of disorientation within the plot. The viewer is left without anyone to trust; isolated and without a figure or villain to point the blame at. Through an, at first, simple but increasing complex plot, submerged in hidden meanings and The luxury of a resolution is withheld from us, leaving us to hang in