The Ghost Writer concludes like Chinatown: a traffic accident, curious passersby, a mood of fatalism. Private detective Jake Gittes intends to do good in Roman Polanski’s 1974 thriller– “I want the big boys that are making the payoffs”–but it all goes wrong.
The first image in Austrian director Michael Haneke’s latest masterpiece, Caché (Hidden), is a long shot of a narrow urban street, leading to a fairly nondescript house. Filmed with a static camera, uninterrupted by editing, and lingering longer than most viewers are accustomed to, this mysteriously ominous glimpse of French street life immediately sets the mood that is the hallmark of Haneke’s work.