Hide and Seek | |
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Theatrical release poster
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Directed by | John Polson |
Produced by | Barry Josephson |
Written by | Ari Schlossberg |
Starring | |
Music by | John Ottman |
Cinematography | Dariusz Wolski |
Edited by | Jeffrey Ford |
Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release date
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Running time
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101 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $25 million |
Box office | $122.7 million |
Hide and Seek is a 2005 American psychological horror-thriller film starring Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning. It was directed by John Polson. The film opened in the United States on January 28, 2005, and grossed $122 million worldwide. Rotten Tomatoes cited praise for De Niro and Fanning for their performances, though its consensus called the film "derivative, illogical and somewhat silly". Fanning received an MTV Movie Award for Best Frightened Performance in 2005.
Following his discovery of the body of his wife (Amy Irving) in a bathtub after her apparent suicide, Dr. David Callaway (Robert De Niro), a psychologist working in New York City, decides to move with his 9-year-old daughter Emily (Dakota Fanning) to Upstate New York. There, Emily makes an apparently imaginary friend she calls "Charlie". Her friendship with Charlie begins to disturb David when he discovers their cat dead in the bathtub, whom Emily claims was a victim of "Charlie". Meanwhile, David suffers from nightmares of the New Year's Eve party that occurred the night before his wife died.
When a family friend, Dr. Katherine Carson (Famke Janssen), comes to visit David and Emily, Emily reveals that she and Charlie have a mutual desire to upset her father. Soon, they meet Laura (Melissa Leo) and Stephen (Robert John Burke) who are their neighbors. David is wary of their unusual interest in Emily. He later discovers that the reason for this is that the couple had a daughter who recently died from cancer and looked like Emily. Later, when David visits Laura, she nervously and ambiguously implies that her husband has begun abusing her in response to their child's death, emotionally and perhaps even physically.
David meets Elizabeth Young (Elisabeth Shue), a local woman, and her niece, Amy, who is roughly the same age as Emily. Hoping to cultivate a new, healthy friendship for Emily, David sets up a play date for her. Amy is anxious to become friends immediately, but the play date is spoiled when Emily cuts up Amy's doll's face. After Amy runs out of the house, Emily tells David that she doesn't need any more friends.