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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Dripping brine and silver halide, Hides – And Go Seek arrives like a mold-spotted postcard from the unconscious. Director Lisetta Delacroix shoots childhood’s simplest pastime through a prism of dread, refracting it into an ontological hall of mirrors where to be seen is to be unmade. The film’s palette—night-soaked cobalts, sickly sodium oranges, and the anaemic turquoise of expired Polaroids—feels scraped from the underside of a dream you can’t quite confess to having.
Instead of grounding us with protagonists who boast tidy arcs, Delacroix lets absence do the acting. The missing faces—blurred in family portraits, scraped off municipal murals—become the movie’s true ensemble. Their vanished features exert gravitational pull on those left behind, warping voices into hesitant falsettos and coaxing sideways glances that linger a half-second too long. Every time the child’s shutter snaps, the town’s geography rewrites itself: a streetlight uproots and slinks into an alley; the church bell tolls thirteen; someone’s grandmother is now only a dressing-gown hanging in an empty room.
Flashbacks, spliced like intrusive memories, reveal the origins: a traveling fair in 1932, its photographer promising immortality for a nickel. We see taffeta skirts, celluloid collars, and a ferris wheel spinning like a rotary dial to the gods. But the camera he wields is a parasite, feeding on the sitters’ essence. Fast-cut close-ups of chemical baths, developing tongs, and eyes widening behind darkroom illumination evoke the birth of cinema itself—an art that once terrified audiences with images that could walk away with your soul. Delacroix weaponizes that primal fear, reminding us that every photograph is a small abduction.
Child actor Piero Gnez embodies the stalking innocence of a playground dictator. His voice—never rising above a playground chant—carries the cold authority of a bell toll. Watch how he caresses the vintage camera as if it were a stuffed animal, eyes glazed with the boredom of someone who has read the end of the story. Opposite him, Alondra Voss plays the librarian with a liminal swagger: part noir detective, part orphan of time. Her scar glows under the sodium lamps like a map of ruptured chronology. In a late-film monologue whispered to a shelf of moldering encyclopedias, she confesses that scars are merely captions written by the world on the body; the camera, then, is an editor that deletes the text entirely.
Composer Yair Morales eschews strings for the creak of piers, the wet thud of bare feet on boardwalk planks, and the respiration of tide pools. When the boy counts—“twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three”—his voice reverberates as if through a conch shell lined with gauze. The effect is synesthetic: numbers feel damp, countable. During the climactic exposure, Morales drops all ambient noise for a single sine wave that climbs until it rattles the ribcage, then cuts to silence so absolute the theater itself seems erased.
Cinematographer Thuyền Lê employs reflective surfaces the way other films use dialogue. Every pane of glass, every tide-slick puddle, becomes a contested site where identity can slip. Note the sequence in the abandoned photo studio: the librarian confronts the boy surrounded by hundreds of dusty mirrors. Instead of filming over her shoulder, Lê places the camera behind the glass, so we watch the watcher being watched, ad infinitum. The result is vertiginous; the viewer’s own reflection intrudes, implicating us in the vampiric act of looking.
Where The Gift Supreme externalized guilt through messianic hallucination, Hides internalizes erasure until the town becomes a palimpsest. Fans of Brother of the Bear will recognize the motif of interspecies spiritual debt, but here the transaction is optical rather than totemic. Meanwhile, the class satire of Society for Sale feels almost polite compared to Delacroix’s sneering indictment of a culture that commodifies memory one snapshot at a time.
What does it mean to disappear someone in an age where data is eternal? The film answers with cruel elegance: physical erasure precedes digital; the body must vanish before the profile pic can haunt. A subplot involves the town’s last remaining journalist (a twitchy performance by Rajiv Malhotra) frantically printing obsolete newspapers, each headline declaring a resident missing who was never born. His ink-stained hands suggest an analog resistance, yet even he ultimately succumbs to the shutter, becoming a headline nobody will read.
Editor Keiko Tsuboi fractures chronology so deftly that cause becomes an afterthought. Early scenes show the librarian discovering her own childhood photo already blank; only later do we witness the moment it was taken. This reverse causality infectes the viewer with a pre-emptive nostalgia: we mourn identities before we meet them. The effect is closer to the esoteric loopings of Den sorte Kugle than to the linear redemption sought in Four Feathers.
When the librarian finally wrests the camera, she turns it on herself in a dilapidated darkroom lit by a single crimson bulb. The ensuing long take—an unbroken seventy-second close-up—forces us to stare into her dilating pupil as the shutter release descends. At the instant of supposed erasure, the film cuts to white, not black. It’s a negative death: all pigment reversed. In the subsequent frames, townsfolk reappear, but their visages flicker like faulty neon, never quite holding. The boy is gone, yet his voice continues counting off-screen, suggesting the game outlives the players, the camera, even the celluloid itself.
Hides – And Go Seek is not a film you enjoy; it is a film that allows you to briefly borrow its amnesia. Long after the credits recede, you’ll find yourself checking mirrors for lag, counting steps to the lobby, unsure whether your reflection will meet your gaze on arrival. Delacroix has crafted a sinister ode to the terror of being perceived, a reminder that every image is a small abduction, every spectator a co-conspirator. Seek it out—before it sees you.
IMDb —
1916
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