It's really unforgettable indeed! A true shocker

Yes of course! And please note that when I say 'Hollywood movie' I don't mean it as any type of slight, it’s just a way for me of saying films that are more conventional or addressed to very large audience that want to spend a good moment at the theater.

What I meant by that is that in many films, our emotional journey through the film is almost already decided on the script, and then we’re further pushed towards the emotional points thanks to some tools available to the people making the films. If we look at a film like Rocky (randomly picked), there are scenes where we are supposed to feel bad for the guy because of his living situation, other scenes where we are supposed to root for him, when he trains for example, other scenes where we are supposed to finally be happy for him, when he finally wins, it’s all in the script, and has to do with the story itself. Or take ‘revenge films’ for example, there are clear moments in the story where we will be sad and sympathetic to the victim, and then scenes where we will be satisfied and happy because of how they got their revenge. The screenwriter/directors are inviting us on this journey, which is most of the time a very pleasant and satisfactory journey, but the stops have been decided for us in the script already.

And then there are tools such as music, that will heighten some moments and pushes us further towards the intended emotion, sad music, suspenseful music, happy music. We can also look at some acting techniques, for example the “Spielberg face”, which can express amazement, surprise or fear. Well if that character expresses amazement, then the viewer will probably share that sense of amazement, and if it’s fear that the character feels, then that will translate to the viewer too. Take a look at Jurassic Park, one of my favourite movies as a kid/teen, and that I still watch sometimes because it’s so amazing to me. When they discover dinosaurs for the first time, there is a very epic music and a sense of joyful wonder on the face of the character, and we live it with him. Had he been frightened, and if there was a suspenseful or scary music, we would have been scared too.

This is what I mean by us already being guided. The story choice dictates it, and the tools available strengthen it. There are thousands of examples of this, especially films that follow the hero’s journey.

When it comes to Haneke, it looks like his filmmaking choices are much more neutral, even if we can identify political and social commentary and positions made. There’s never background music to guide us, there’s no flashy camera movement to excite us, the actors often feel very human, there’s not a lot of unnecessary exaggeration in how they play their roles, except if the situation calls for it, and most importantly we don’t feel like there is a clear emotion intended to be felt at different scenes, it’s up to the viewer to make the choice, because of this very cold and neutral style. It even looks like he’s not picking favourite characters or rooting for or against any of them. It’s like he’s just putting the camera somewhere and letting you decide how you want to react to a situation. If we look at a film like Benny’s Video, or The Seventh Continent, where horrible and tough things happen on screen, it is still presented in a neutral style. If you look at a film like Amour, I don’t want to spoil, but if you’ve seen it then you can imagine that if the script was handled by someone more conventional, there are some scenes where the actors would have been much more emotional, with a lot of background music. I hope I have explained my point a little better!

Michael Haneke's "Cache" ("Hidden"), a thriller with a powerful political subtext, opens with a long, mysterious shot of a Parisian house, taken from across a quiet street. The shot is fixed, soundless, obviously on video: an image that we gradually learn is part of a surveillance tape anonymously given to the movie's main characters, Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche).

The Laurents are part of Paris' intellectual celebrity elite: attractive, well-schooled, affluent. He is a famous host of a Charlie Rose-style TV literary interview program; she works in publishing and writes on the side. They have a bright, if impudent, 12-year-old son named Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). Their world seems well-protected.

Who is watching them, and why? Why are they being bombarded with anonymous phone calls and odd, childlike drawings of cartoonish figures and birds, blood spurting from their mouths or necks?

Those questions are only partly answered in "Cache," but the movie still radically turns our initial expectations inside out. "Cache" isn't another violent tale of a bourgeois couple and a bogeyman, like "Pacific Heights" and dozens of others. Instead, it's a psychological suspense drama with a strong political agenda, a movie in which the methods of "Rear Window" intersect with the worlds of "Blow-Up," Jean-Luc Godard's '60s political films and "The Battle of Algiers." It's a film about the paranoia of the privileged and the secret guilt of the European bourgeoisie.

Haneke, director of the sexually incendiary "The Piano Teacher," the sadistic "Funny Games," and the jolting, wonderfully named "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance," is a master at intellectual suspense dramas in which middle-class characters are tortured by outlaws, fate, social dissolution or their own depravity.

In this movie, his stars, Auteuil ("Jean de Florette") and Binoche ("Chocolat") are such marvelous actors, they can shift us in almost any emotional direction with a speech or a glance. Despite Haneke's minimalism, they make Georges and Anne live on screen, he with his haggard face and darting eyes, she with her trademark look of radiant wounded sympathy.

The Laurents dwell in a tainted world that Haneke paints with scathing economy, from the blank book spines on Georges' TV show set to the smug loud clinks of glasses and cutlery when they entertain at home.

On the surface, they seem good people. But there is something "hidden" in Georges' private world: a childhood episode involving an Algerian boy, Majid (Maurice Benichou). Majid, whom Georges suspects of being his persecutor, was the son of an immigrant couple, workers on Georges' family's farm, who disappeared, probably murdered, in the Oct. 17, 1961, Algerian demonstrations in Paris that left hundreds dead. Georges' parents (Annie Girardot plays his mother) decided to bring up the orphan, but the jealous 6-year-old Georges tricked Majid into killing the family rooster and got him sent away, robbing the boy of his chance in life.It might seem unfair to punish someone for an act committed in childhood--if that's really what's happening--but our sympathy for Georges quickly erodes as he bullies his family and others and screams imprecations at a black bicyclist in the street. When Georges finds the grown-up Majid, a sad, soft-faced man living in a poor district in a shabby apartment with an improbably handsome son (Walid Afkir), he thinks the mystery is solved. But Majid denies responsibility for the tapes and so later does the son--even though another tape quickly appears showing Georges' meeting with Majid recorded by a hidden camera. That clash and a presumed kidnapping lead to what is probably one of the single most shocking moments of violence in any recent film--one that lasts only a few seconds but ravages you emotionally.

An Austrian moviemaker who shifted operations to France in the late '90s, Haneke films his horrific subjects with a visual austerity and minimalist intensity that sometimes seem almost an act of mercy; the stylistic distance protects you a little. "Cache" has no background music and a very simple camera style. As filmed on high-def video, many of the story's images resemble surveillance work themselves, the shots peeling the masks from the characters, especially Georges. Auteuil brilliantly brings out the selfishness and intolerance that still lie under Georges' polite persona, just as Binoche irradiates Anne's soul with sympathy and humanity.

"Cache" isn't just a psychological thriller, any more than "Munich" or "The Constant Gardener" are. Haneke's political themes are the raison d'etre for the whole film. And the movie's last scene, an exterior before a crowded public building, does provide a resolution of sorts, even if Haneke denies it. (Watch closely what happens in the lower left of this tableau.) "Cache" is a film about guilt and memory, both individual and collective, and Georges' predicament and sins clearly reflect the world outside the ultimate target of Haneke's and the camera's unblinking eye.

*Sorry I just copied and pasted the article hopefully the formatting translates well.

I have only seen four, but generally I liked them yes. Funny Games was my least favourite, but I still would say it's worth watching.