Reassessing ‘Hide and Seek’ 20 Years Later
Upstate New York is a beautiful place, especially for a scary story. From Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow to the Quiet Place series, the horror genre’s most visually vivid tales are often told among the Empire State’s many mountains, valleys, rivers, and lakes.
Into this verdant field falls Hide and Seek, an obscure 2005 thriller starring Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, and Elisabeth Shue that turns 20 this month. While it may not be widely remembered today, I have a strong personal attachment to it because I saw it in theaters as a sophomore college student in upstate New York. My Bard College classmates and I openly speculated about the film’s much-ballyhooed twist ending. One of them, the child of a studio executive, explained how 20th Century Fox had distributed prints to theaters without the final reel to avoid leaking spoilers. That strategy ultimately proved wise, as the highly profitable Hide and Seek grossed more than $127 million on a $30 million budget.
Like most audiences (but unlike esteemed critic Roger Ebert), I too was surprised by the ending. Indeed, my reaction to the finale has shaped my views on critiquing cinema ever since. It’s here that I must post a spoiler alert, as I can’t explain either the underrated greatness of Hide and Seek or my problem with its ending sans revealing the twist.
The premise of Hide and Seek sees psychologist Dr. David Callaway (De Niro) move to upstate New York with his daughter Emily (Fanning) after both are traumatized from the seeming suicide of their wife/mother Alison (Amy Irving). For most of the movie, we believe they’re being terrorized by Emily’s imaginary friend Charlie, who could be either a supernatural entity or one of the many “strangers” wandering around the neighborhood. Charlie murders the family cat, David’s new girlfriend Elisabeth (Shue), and a nosy sheriff (Dylan Baker). Yet in the end, we discover “Charlie” was actually David all along—or, more precisely, an alternative personality created by David. The film implies he developed dissociative identity disorder (DID) after discovering Alison cuckolding him (he later killed her and faked her suicide).
All of this paints the reality of DID and living with it in an inaccurate and disparaging light. The diagnosis appears, directly and indirectly, in horror and thriller movies like Identity, Secret Window, My Bloody Valentine, and The Ward. People who have DID possess two or more distinct personalities which can have their own unique names, histories, and characteristics. Usually developed as a coping mechanism for severe trauma, people with DID often suffer from anxiety, depression, memory gaps, self-destructive behavior, and even suicidality. Emphatically, they are no more prone to violence than the rest of the population.
I was dismayed. Only a few years earlier I had been diagnosed as autistic, and from that day on fiercely identified with the budding neurodiversity movement. It was and still is controversial whether DID should be “officially” deemed a neurodivergent condition, but because people with DID face stigmas as a result of their neurological differences, I argued (and still do) that they deserved the allyship of neurodiverse people regardless of any label.
When I explained all of this to my fellow Bard students, they agreed with me. Bard had a reputation at the time as America’s most liberal college (I had been labeled “conservative” by some fellow students the previous year for supporting first Joe Lieberman and then John Edwards for president in the 2004 Democratic primaries), and several in the group suggested I write an article in our college newspaper “The Bard Observer” blasting Hide and Seek.
I decided against it because, despite disliking aspects of the ending, I still enjoyed the movie. While the term “cancel culture” didn’t yet exist as a phrase for ostracizing a person or entity for being problematic, the students still understood the concept. More troublingly, every one of them on the night we saw Hide and Seek agreed that if I felt the ending was ableist, I couldn’t in good conscience recommend the movie.
Even though I appreciated director John Polson’s ability to capture the feel of upstate New York, enjoyed Ari Schlossberg’s clever script, and thought De Niro and Fanning gave characteristically fantastic central performances, my friends wouldn’t budge. I even observed that Hide and Seek offers layered and realistic portrayals of mental health problems like the trauma of witnessing violence and the trauma of being cuckolded, as well as explores important issues like child abuse and toxic masculinity. My peers remained unmoved.
Much to my subsequent regret, I ultimately decided not to write the review at all. It just didn’t seem to be worth the trouble. In retrospect, I should have defended the movie’s strong writing, acting, and cinematography, while pointing out my reservations about the conclusion’s implications for people with DID. (Of course, I would have also included a spoiler alert.) Perhaps most importantly, I would have tried to articulate that one can point out how harmful stigmas are perpetuated in works of art while still appreciating their value.
While I didn’t make that case at the time, I carried the incident with me through my subsequent writing career, especially as a film critic. When I disliked depictions of mental health and neurodiversity in other movies, I tried to strike a balance between calling out the wrong depictions and emphasizing that I was not advocating outright cancelation. I did this when the movie itself was good, such as M. Night Shyamalan’s 2016 thriller Split, and I did it when a picture’s overall quality was as terrible as its science, like with Sia’s 2021 drama Music.
On the former occasion, I even expressed hope the good movie would have a sequel (which it ultimately did), and on the latter, I wrote of the bad movie that “for all of its faults, I do not get the sense that Sia made this movie with hate in her heart, and therefore I do not see Sia, her collaborators or the movie itself as deserving of the ultimate form of cultural sanction.”
Although Hide and Seek did not receive “the ultimate form of cultural sanction” (cancellation), it has fallen into obscurity in the two decades since January 2005. More regrettably, it has an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of 12% (50% among the audience), suggesting a poor reputation I consider undeserved. I hope to one day live in a world where both Hide and Seek is ranked alongside the best works of De Niro and Fanning, and characters with DID and other neurological differences are regularly shown in pop culture as three-dimensional protagonists instead of mere ciphers for villainousness and deviance. Since I do not have DID, I will not speculate as to which pop culture samples could serve as examples of positive representations. As an autistic person, however, I continue to struggle to find three-dimensional representations, and I am not alone in feeling this way.
My views are epitomized by Hide and Seek’s multiple alternate endings. After David is killed and Emily is rescued by his former student Katherine (Famke Janssen), the audience learns in four of the five endings that Emily inherited her father’s DID; the fifth simply shows Katherine and Emily happily walking away from their new home. Of the other four endings, the conclusions only vary from each other in how Emily’s mental illness is revealed. Depending on the version, it’s either shown through Emily residing in a psychiatric ward (there are two versions of this), Emily playing hide-and-seek with her reflection in a mirror, or Emily drawing herself having two heads.
While the happy ending feels forced, the other four endings all work quite well on an artistic level. They also imply that mental illness and neurodiversity are curses that can be passed along, akin to any other horror genre monster. No matter which one you pick, the good and the bad are inextricably intertwined.
This is Hide and Seek in a nutshell. One can say that it is also true of the complexity of the human mind, regardless of whether it exists within our own skulls or splattered into the outside world as a work of art.
Categorized:Editorials
