Review of "Hide and Seek," Hollywood's failed attempt to repeat the success of "Parasites
A completely incompetent remake of the 2013 Korean hit of the same name.
Noah (Jonathan Reese Meyers) is a successful businessman who has everything the average American dreams of: a loving wife, a couple of children, a nice apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and a whole company that has just been inherited. The hero, however, is a little troubled by his older brother Jacobs (Joshua Elsher), with whom they have long lost contact. Noah decides to find a loved one and finds himself in the middle of a dark intrigue. In the poor house where the relative lived, people shudder at the mere mention of Jacob's name, and in the apartment next door, a girl has mysteriously disappeared. At the same time, an unknown man in a motorcycle helmet kills people in the neighborhood and gradually gets to Noah's family.
"Hide and Seek" is a remake of the Korean thriller of the same name, which became a local hit back in 2013. Interestingly, six years before "Parasites," the film made sense of social inequality in the country through an architectural metaphor: the poor were presented as cockroaches scurrying around in the walls of rich houses, trying by all means to get a place in the sun. It is clear why the American producers were interested in the story. The concept is universal, scathing, relevant in any geography: the wealthy and the poor are everywhere. Even, as it turned out, in socialist China, where "Hide and Seek" received a remake in 2016.
The American version follows the original more or less exactly - the same plot, plot twists and characters that are similar in character. It would seem difficult to spoil anything here: it is enough to change Korean apartment buildings for a ghetto hut in New York, and a genre hit is in your pocket. But if there's one thing that Hollywood's "Hide and Seek" teaches us, it's that getting even such a simple formula right is an art form. Which, unfortunately, director Joel Moore has not mastered at all.
If the Korean original is almost a benchmark chamber thriller, the American remake looks like the gold standard of cinematic incompetence. It's a movie that simply can't tell a straightforward story. If you haven't seen the source material, you'll probably be puzzled as to what the hell is even going on. The events follow one another without any logic, important plot details are given at random, the film is always in a hurry, creating the illusion of dynamics, sacrificing any dramaturgical coherence (not for nothing does it run 20 minutes less than the original). The new "Hide and Seek" looks like the authors had no script at all, just some abstract ideas of what the genre should be. Long shots staring into the void, unwarranted jumpscapes and mysterious flashbacks. And at the end, of course, a crazy twist.
But we know that they had a script. It was a different picture, one that presented the story in a clear and logical way. Alfred Hitchcock once said that there are only three things you need for a good movie: a script, a screenplay, and a screenplay. And if "Hide and Seek" 2021 will go down in the history of cinema, it is only because the creators decided to challenge the legend of cinema. Hitchcock said, "You were wrong. Here we had a script - and look what we did with it.
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