The Hidden Face (2004)

Directed by: Elbert van Strien | 15 minutes | drama, horror, thriller, short film | Actors: Heleen Mineur, Griete van den Akker

With the exception of the movie’s fanciful ending, ‘The Hidden Face’ seems, at least on a plot level, to be a simple story about a girl who doesn’t know what to do when her grandmother gets sick. But seems deceiving. You can let go of different interpretations of Van Strien’s short film, and there are also interesting themes.

The story begins very familiarly as Lisa talks about her usual experiences at Grandma’s house. How the pink tableware is for the ladies, the smell that was always there, the pictures of strange people “who are no longer there”, and how the birds sounded different when you climbed the tree in the garden. And, even though it was always a bit strange with Grandma, she felt comfortable there and didn’t want to disappear like sometimes with Mom.

Yet you immediately notice that something mysterious or creepy is about to happen. This has a lot to do with the mysterious violin orchestration, but the camera work and the setting are also responsible for this. The creepy wallpaper “that began to live at night”, the shot in which we see the reflection of Lisa and Grandma in the pendulum of the clock, which often stopped “because it didn’t feel like it”, it all makes that there is an eerie edge to this fairy tale. It is therefore not difficult to see why the film has won the Hans Christian Andersen Award in Denmark.

One day everything changed for Lisa. Grandma has a different voice and doesn’t say much anyway, suddenly uses blue crockery, and pours it with a hand that moves differently than before. The birds suddenly stop chirping. Then Grandma falls to the floor in her bedroom when she wants to call the doctor and asks Lisa for help. Apart from the behavior of the birds, the events are quite easy to explain to the viewer: Grandma has become ill and is behaving differently than usual because of this. However, Lisa doesn’t see it that way: this can’t be her grandmother. And after Grandma’s request, she locks the bedroom door and leaves. After all: “Grandma doesn’t like doctors at all”. Terrible what she does, of course, but we do understand where this behavior comes from. She can’t deal with a sick and aging grandmother, with all the transformations that come with it. This is quite understandable. This doesn’t make it any less tragic, though, and these simultaneous and conflicting feelings are captivating to experience as a viewer. We feel sorry for both Lisa and Grandma, while the former’s actions are in themselves particularly reprehensible.

Lisa shields herself from the situation and tells her doll that grandma is coming back soon and is just running some errands. This while grandma is dying upstairs and calling for help. This is a great occasion for a Hitchcockian scene in which we see Granny, filmed over her shoulder, move painfully slowly towards the stairwell. At first she wants to be able to press the button for her electric chair, but it does not work, after which the outcome can be guessed. The spirit of the “master of suspense” seems to hang over more parts of this production. For example, the musical accompaniment is sometimes very reminiscent of Hermann’s work for the master, especially when the violin tones suddenly slide up or down quickly, like a shiver that runs down your spine. And couldn’t ‘Psycho’ somehow have been a source of inspiration for Van Strien? The phrase, “Grandma isn’t quite herself” seems to refer to Norman Bates’ nearly identical statement about his mother. And that movie, too, revolved around an inability to accept the death of a parent, and the child continued to live as if the person in question had never died.

This dimension, the one between death and life, is also played visually in Van Strien’s film, for example by letting grandma, when she walks up the stairs with Lisa during her ill period, slowly fade through overflows and reappear somewhere else. And with a little good will, you can see a reference to Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ in the overhead shots of the stair in the house. The good thing is that there is not one solution. The end of the film also leaves open the possibility that it is all about the ill will of the house. Above all, however, the film has become an atmospheric and mysterious fairy tale that also functions as a character study about a girl who, according to her mother, “does not want to grow up”, and therefore naturally also wants to know little about (the possibility of) aging and, worse, death. ‘The Hidden Face’ is a beautiful short film by a talented, imaginative film maker that we hope we will hear a lot more about.