Movies with twist endings are a bane of film criticism. Because critics are expected not to give away the plot, they are forced to discuss the film in less than detailed terms. It’s even more difficult if the film simply is just not that good because the urge to give away whatever clichéd, improbable “twist” was tacked on to the end of it becomes almost unbearable.
I won’t give away the ending of “Hide and Seek”; suffice to say it is so unexpected that no amount of plot detail I could give you would lead you to guess it without the assistance of some sort of random plot-device generator.
The film concerns a New York City psychologist (Robert De Niro) who lives happily with his wife and daughter (Amy Irving and Dakota Fanning, respectively). We know they live happily because the wife and daughter play on a playground while the father buys hot dogs in the first scene of the film. The film dispatches with their bliss in record time, having the mother commit suicide before the opening credits. After some meaningless psychobabble with a colleague, the father takes his daughter to an upstate resort community, now empty in the dead of fall.
The daughter begins to act strangely, creating an imaginary friend named Charlie who she plays hide-and-seek with. We meet the town sheriff, the real estate agent and the neighbors, all sufficiently creepy to make you think something really weird is going on. We see an old cavern in the woods and various spooky goings-on. In other words, we see a lot of false leads.
What is most infuriating about the film is that up until the last half hour it actually works. It creates a strong sense of mood with its New England locations (perfect ghost story territory) and almost sets itself up for a strong finish. But then the closing act hits and it becomes clear that all of that build-up was just a front to keep you from guessing the true nature of the film. It has cynically thrown false suspects at the audience in order to mislead, never giving anything that would reveal its ending. The whole thing is so unabashedly manipulative that it is actually insulting. If this were a mystery novel, it would end up tossed on the barbecue after one reading. The simple fact that the ending is so out-of-the-blue reveals how arbitrary it is, tacked on as a gimmick, breaking the sense of atmosphere built up to that point.
So in the end, the film wastes a decent performance from De Niro, an excellent one from Fanning and a whole lot of glossy production values. Director John Polson shows that he has subjected stylistic ability to the service of gimmicky Hollywood thrillers (his last film, “Swimfan,” wasn’t much more than a “Fatal Attraction” rip-off), De Niro has collected another paycheck through the waste of his considerable talent and writer Ari Schlossberg is off to a brilliantly uncreative career. The only one who escapes unscathed is the wonderful Fanning, though it would be nice if she would try for a role in something more difficult than “Cat in the Hat” and maybe avoid such sentimental clap-trap as that 132-minute Starbucks commercial, “I Am Sam.”
While we’re going through our wish list, maybe we can also ask for a couple of stylish, entertaining thrillers that don’t insult our intelligence.

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