Among the most acclaimed of the films to emerge from this year's Cannes and London Film Festivals, this spine tingling, Hitchcockian thriller is another icily intelligent dissection of modern middle-class morality from Austrian director Michael Haneke. Audiences have certain expectations of Haneke's films by now and, although his latest offering is perhaps more restrained than the likes of Funny Games or The Piano Teacher, it is no less intense or formally brilliant. From the outset, Haneke continually plays with the audience's expectations and sympathies, deliberately wrong-footing us and forcing us to question our reactions. As a result, Hidden manages to create an unnerving and profoundly disturbing atmosphere of tension and dread throughout.  

Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche play Georges and Anne, an upper middle-class couple with a teenage son, comfortably ensconced in the Parisian intelligentsia (he hosts a highbrow literary panel show; she works in publishing). However, their intellectual, theoretical world is as far removed from the real one as they are from each other, and they go through the motions in a glacial, unaffectionate marriage. This privileged existence is forever disrupted when they begin to receive covertly recorded videotapes of their home, wrapped in macabre child-like drawings depicting bloodied cartoon figures. Georges initially protests his ignorance as to why their family are being menaced in this way, but as the sinister tapes continue to arrive, he is shaken from his selective amnesia and suspects that this obscure campaign of malice has roots in his past. Plagued by nightmares of a long suppressed incident from his childhood, Georges' investigation leads him to the low rent suburbs of Paris and a dark rendez-vous with a guilty secret. 

Working on one level as an elusive urban nightmare of a thriller, playing on all the paranoia of modern life (surveillance; the safety of children), the film gradually opens out into a far more complex exploration of guilt and responsibility as Georges delves deeper into his past. Underneath the surface, Haneke seems to have a wider project, encompassing French denial of their colonial history, and a contemporary unwillingness to engage with the race and class divide in modern French society (a subject especially pertinent in the wake of the riots that have scarred the country this autumn.). 

Haneke elicits performances of searing intensity from his two heavy-weight leads, with Auteil especially excelling as the morally ambiguous anti-hero. But the most haunting turn comes from Maurice Benichou in a small but crucial role that hangs heavy over the film and will stay with the viewer long after the credits roll. Without wanting to give anything away, there is a scene between Auteil and Benichou in the film's final third that is so shocking, the audience watches it in horrified disbelief.  

Austere, taut, and forensic in its peeling away of the veneer of Western arrogance, Haneke presents us with an unforgiving examination of the lies and secrets we chose to ignore. Book-ending the piece with two deceptively simple locked off wide shots, the director forces us to stare at the familiar until it becomes unfamiliar, the known until it becomes unknowable, and challenges us to examine what we think we know until it reveals it secrets.