Norway, 2009
Review:
JA Kerswell
A beautifully constructed and intriguing Norwegian thriller with slasher undertones. A young man returns to his home town after his abusive mother’s death. Going through her house, he has the nagging feeling that he is not alone and begins to suspect that another boy his mother abducted may now be fully grown and lurking nearby. Soon, local people begin to disappear, murdered by a red hoodie-wearing killer. A veritable jigsaw puzzle of a movie, with its pieces circling and falling into place to give up most of—if not all—its secrets by the time the end credits roll.
Kai (Kristoffer Joner) clearly hated and feared his mother. He even snaps her fingers in the morgue to make sure she’s really dead. He is haunted by an incident that happened when he was a boy in 1989—when he inadvertently caused an accident trying to escape from his abusive home that led to the death of two young parents hit on the roadside by a swerving truck. Their young son Peter was in the woods nearby as it happened, with authorities believing the boy wandered through the fog in shock before falling to his death at a nearby waterfall.
Kai’s mother’s house is near derelict and full of piles of homemade dolls. Haunted by the place and tempted to burn it to the ground, he elects to stay in a nearby hotel that is closing for the winter. He also reconnects with an old friend Sara (Cecilie A. Mosli), who warns Kai that not everyone is happy to see him back in town. Later, he sees a light on in his mother’s house and investigates to find that two teenagers have broken in to stay the night. However, they are attacked and killed by someone in a red hoodie with a doll-faced mask.
Once the authorities start to look for the teenagers, Kai quickly becomes the prime suspect in their disappearance. He shows Sara the hidden basement cell his mother kept him in where he was tortured—and shares his theory that Peter didn’t die that night. He says that his mother took him and also kept him at the house, and now that she is dead, Peter is loose. Not knowing what to believe, Sara starts to think that Kai’s past traumas have caught up with him, and he is perhaps losing his grip on sanity …
Pål Øie’s Scandi horror/thriller looks beautiful and suitably bleak. The deep, misty, dark woods and are shot with a chilly Norwegian Blue hue—with no warmth or respite inside buildings. The film references fairy tales—Peter and The Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood—and the woods themselves are more than just a backdrop, with the killer literally using parts of it (branches) to impale and kill. It also teases a supernatural aspect early on, but ultimately reveals itself to be rooted in the psychological—even if that involves hallucinations and sometimes surreal set pieces. It is coy about the truth right up until the end—and even then, it is ambiguous as to whether the mystery is really solved. Protagonist Kai is the archetypical unreliable narrator. We are never entirely sure what is true and what is a product of his trauma-addled mind. It could be frustrating, but the film is so well-made, and Joner’s performance is so good that it works—although some might struggle with its more out-there elements and a couple of glaring plot holes. This isn’t a typical slasher movie by any stretch, but it does feature a mystery killer and brutal murders—and was perhaps inspired by the original ‘hoodie horror’ ILS (aka
THEM) (2006).
Øie had teamed up with Joner previously on the earlier VILLMARK (2003)—another film that toyed with the conventions of the backwoods slasher movie. The director made a tangential sequel VILLMARK 2 (2015). Joner is probably best known to international audiences for Norwegian disaster movies such as THE WAVE (2015) and THE QUAKE (2018).
Whilst it might not work for viewers looking for more typical slasher fayre, HIDDEN is recommended for those with a taste for something a little bit different.
BODY COUNT 6:
Female 2 / Male 4
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HIDDEN trailer