Quote:
Originally Posted by Tiger_vs_Mantis
i don't know what you mean by "satisfying." not every movie needs to be neatly wrapped up with all the answers laid out for you. are there hack directors who have no clue what they are doing? sure, but haneke isn't one of them. the film by itself should make that clear as it is very well thought out and rich with emotional/psychological and political undertones.
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By "unsatisfying" I mean spending ninety minutes setting up tension and interest in teh premise of a film and then cheating the viewer by avoiding giving the solution you've been setting the audience up for. This doesn't mean I think it is necessary to have everything neatly wrapped up and that I hate ambiguity, but what kind of ambiguity are we talking about? Are we talking about the kind of moral ambiguity of a film like
Chinatown, where there are no real heroes and villains and where things aren't put to right at the end? Or the kind of ambiguity in films like
Mulholland Drive, where weird things happen with seemingly no logical connection between events and where nothing is explained at the end? I don't mind the ambiguity of the first kind, but the second kind I don't find much pleasure in, and
Hidden veers dangerously close to the latter kind of - well, dare I say it -
hackwork? I don't disrespect the filmmaker's talent necessarily, I just don't understand what audiences who like this kind of film get out of it, and also what the average person can get from it.
I also don't understand what Haneke was trying to do with this film, ie, play a game with us, or entertain us, or what?
