Hide and Seek

(2005) ***

It's hard not to feel a bit cheated by the promise of Hide and Seek. Dread permeates the first two acts, and though I admit I didn't see the plot twist coming (blinded as I was by a review that left me thinking Dylan Baker would turn out to be the bad guy. It made perfect sense, of course: nobody who has seen Happiness will ever accept a tuna sandwich from this man again. And when he arrives on the scene in the home stretch, I thought, "okay, I guess we can all relax, now that trustworthy Dylan Baker is on the scene.") the whole movie would have been much more satisfying as a ghost story than as a whodunit.
But it's definitely worth a look. Actually, it's worth two looks. Like any good whodunit, H&S builds into each portrayal the possibility that this could be the person responsible for all of the mayhem. This is particularly well-done with Dakota Fanning. She's a gifted young actress with preternatural depth (something that works against her in a movie like Man on Fire, in which her preternatural depth gave me the friggin creeps) and a second viewing is necessary to separate her performance from the sleight-of-hand of the filmmakers. And here's something I couldn't have realized about Fanning's performance while playing the guessing-game: that smile on her face isn't her being creepy --- she's happy.
She's got someone friendly in her life; a playmate and a confidant, some to share secrets with. And when your pastime is ripping the faces off of other girls dolls, friends are kind of hard to come by. Her world has been turned upside down by her mom's suicide and her ineffectual psychologist dad (DeNiro) sees her less as a daughter in pain and more as a case study, but she's got one really close friend and it wasn't until viewing #2 that I got to sit back and savor her happiness, not to mention the rich perplexity she experiences when she realizes her fun, new friend Charlie isn't such a beacon of light after all.
So, fabulous effort by the young Fanning; solid set-up work by Dylan Baker and Amy Irving (as the suicide); utterly superfluous role for Famke Janssen (as Fanning's doctor), but boy is she hot; DeNiro is a disappointment here -- his lame mildness in Acts 1&2 give way to a wholly uncompelling ratcheting up of intensity in Act 3.
PS -- I'd have hoped that filmmakers everywhere would have learned from the little moron in the movie Shane that children repeating catchphrases in a singsongy voice isn't interesting, it's annoying.