A Frankensteinian fusion of every thriller made in Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Don’t Say a Word, Hide and Seek is as nuts as Dakota Fanning. (Beware: Spoilers lie herein.) It’s as if the method-y actress’s eyes in the film seem to be part of an elaborate equation consisting entirely of bad horror tropes and trashy psychological symbolism that may as well have been written out by failed-psych-majors-turned-wannabe-screenwriters. In essence: Dakota Fanning’s Iris = The Big Black Cave Outside Daddy’s House = Daddy Possibly Wants To Touch (or Kill) My Pussy(cat). After doting-mom Alison Callaway (Amy Irving) commits suicide (or did she?), her psychologist husband David (Robert De Niro) and their daughter Emily (Fanning) land in Woodland, New York, where Emily gets cozy with a possibly imaginary entity named Charlie. Katherine (Famke Janssen), a protégé of David’s, intermittingly pops into frame with the express purpose of unpacking Emily’s psychological baggage for anyone in the crowd with the I.Q. of a peanut (to wit: “Trauma causes pain—eventually the mind will learn how to release it”). True to form, Fanning’s performance is at once hilariously and terrifyingly mannered (like a greatest-tics-package culled from the Jennifer Jason Leigh catalog), her eyes a constant source of wonder. Though the size of Fanning’s gigantic irises suggest the actress chose to evoke her Pavlovian dog’s deep-rooted trauma by blinking as little as possible, this questionable exercise (note to Datoka: ask yourself, “What would Meryl Streep do?”) does manage to work its way seamlessly—however ridiculously—into the film’s lame-brained obsession with the unconscious. It’s a formula that’s scarcely fleshed-out, which is to say that the film belongs to that genre of bad horror flicks that include Gothika and The Ring, where gimmickry and loud flashes frequently try to pass for psychological insight.
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