Sightlines · reception
How Caché was received
2005 · Michael Haneke · Caché on Sightlines
The arc
Acclaimed from the moment it won Haneke Best Director at Cannes in 2005, and its stature has only climbed since — it's become a fixture near the top of best-of-the-2000s critics' polls, one of the few films of its decade whose canonization happened in real time.
What’s debated
The eternal fight is over the mystery at its center and the famous final shot — is the answer hidden in plain sight, does it even matter, and is Haneke a genius for withholding it or just punishing his audience?
Its footprint
Its long, static surveillance shots became shorthand for a whole strand of 2000s art cinema, and 'watch the last shot very carefully' is one of cinephilia's most-repeated pieces of advice — the film also pushed the long-suppressed memory of the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters back into public conversation.
Where it stands
A load-bearing pillar of the 21st-century art-house canon — the Haneke that even people who resist Haneke concede is a masterpiece, and a rite of passage for anyone working through modern European cinema.
Did you know? Austria submitted Caché for the Foreign Language Oscar but the Academy ruled it ineligible because its dialogue is in French rather than German — the controversy helped push the Academy to relax that language rule the following year.