Director Michael Haneke's Paris-set drama plays with levels of reality right from the start. It opens with a seemingly innocuous shot of a street that turns out to be footage from one of several mysterious and unnerving video tapes sent to bourgeois couple Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche). Georges can't imagine who is sending the tapes, but scrawled drawings that accompany some of them begin to trigger memories of his childhood, particularly of a shameful incident involving an Algerian boy. And so the film begins to methodically unravel the many meanings of the title: here are hidden cameras, hidden secrets and people of colour who might as well be hidden for all the notice that wealthy white people like Georges and Anne take of them. The sense of dread that the director expertly builds up may lead more literal-minded viewers to expect tidy, thriller-style closure at the end. But, marshalling together themes and notions about morality that have pervaded his work for years - from Benny's Video through to Funny Games - Haneke produces something far more unsettling, oblique and undoubtedly masterful.

George, host of a television show focusing on literature, receives videos shot on the sly that feature his family, along with disturbing drawings that are difficult to interpret. He has no idea who has made and sent him the videos. Progressively, the contents of the videos become more personal, indicating that the sender has known George for a long time.