L'ombre du passé

Rhys-Meyers is and OCD guy looking for his missing brother when he gets into an underground realm of squatters that starts to move in on his own family's safety. It's not who you think it's gonna be...which is fun. But the story is a smidge disjointed.

This was an ok one time watch and nothing more. A tad bit slow but the build up of the story remained stabled enough to follow. Rhys Meyer played a solid lead throughout but it was more cameoish for Joe P. Nothing to write home about so if you have nothing else on your to watch list and have time to burn, this will not disappoint. On a another note, I have to say that Rhys Meyers and Barett are both ten years younger than me (I'm in mid my 50s) and they both look older than I am....wow. Never forget that your body is temple. I digress.

All that I knew about the 2021 movie "Hide and Seek" as I sat down to watch it was that the movie was a thriller and that it had Jonathan Rhys Meyers on the cast list.

So I wasn't sure what to expect from writer and director Joel David Moore here with this 2021 thriller. In fact, you could say that I entered the movie with an open slate, so Joel David Moore had every opportunity to entertain and thrill me with his movie.

But ultimately that was not to be. Sure, "Hide and Seek" was watchable, but the storyline was just not particularly convincing or entertaining, and too many things didn't really make much of any sense. So as the movie came to an end, I have to say that I was left with a sense of 'was that truly it?'.

The acting performances in the movie were good, and I have to say that Jonathan Rhys Meyers really carried the movie quite well. Sue Jean Kim put on a good performance as well, just a shame that she wasn't given a more prominent role with more screen time. It was good to see Joe Pantoliano in the movie, though he was not given much of any screen time really.

For a thriller then "Hide and Seek" just didn't really cut it for me. The movie was too generic and held back by a storyline that made little sense a lot of the time. So if you enjoy thrillers, there are far better options readily available out there.

My rating of "Hide and Seek" lands on a very generous four out of ten stars.

I'm glad to see that so many of the reviews are echoing the feeling that I had when the movie finally came to an end. I'm still struggling to find the point of the production since, and this is the one positive about the film, it felt like it was building to something interesting - even if it left you disappointed in the end.

I actually came onto IMDB to see if someone had written a synopsis for this (since I clearly missed the point) but see that this hasn't been done - I suspect because, like me, others had trouble making sense of it all.

The suspense was fine, as well as the acting. There were some nice little twists now and there and it was not predictable.

Is someone messing with the main character or is he messing with others? Is he losing his mind? Who is the villain and what do they want? Enough to keep you guessing til the very end.

However, it feels like it was meant to be a three hours movie and somehow it got cut into less than hour and a half.

As a result, there are subplots that literally go nowhere, underdeveloped characters and motivations, background stories that never get explored in a meaningful way, very vague hints at something possibly important about the characters and so on.

Haven't seen the original Korean movie yet, but this one kinda makes want to do it in order to place all the missing pieces together.