Hide and Seek

Hide and reek: De Niro vehicle doesn't offer new horror ideas

By Anthony Del Valle

The best that can be said about Hide and Seek it is that the title becomes more meaningful as the plot plays out.

Ari Schlossberg's screenplay, directed by John Polson, gives us a 9-year-old girl, Emily (Dakota Fanning), traumatized by the suicide of her mother (Amy Irving), who slits her wrists in their Manhattan apartment bathtub. Daddy David (Robert De Niro) takes daughter to the countryside to recuperate. Lonely daughter spends a lot of time talking to her imaginary friend, Charlie. Daddy understands that imaginary friends can be good for little girls. But then the invisible friend starts killing people.

That's a good start for a horror film. And there is one genuinely scary moment: When David, shortly after lecturing his daughter that imaginary friends don't exist, slowly notices that a stuck window inside Emily's second-story bedroom has been pried opened.

But the film's first third is full of stock tricks: You know, the "killer" jumping out of a closet winds up being just the family cat; that sort of thing. The behavior of one of the characters is so illogical--especially considering his profession--that it's pretty easy to guess early what's going on. (Worse, another major horror film released last year used the same gimmick.) And the daughter's predicament is made so pathetic, so painful, that it's hard to enjoy the attempts at spookery. It's no fun watching an innocent child suffer so much just so we can be entertained by a "Boo!"

De Niro suggests that with the right script, his baffled father might have made for a performance of considerable complexity. Fanning has been directed to play the child as a Dawn of the Dead type, with huge, unblinking eyes and a monotone voice dripping with gloom and doom.

Could it be that the horror film genre has simply run out of ideas?