“Are you less lonely because you can sit in the garden? Do you feel less lonely in the Metro than at home?”

The premise of Michael Haneke’s Caché is so simple that it can almost be described as a high concept psychological horror film. But of course it is much more than that, and its extreme formal style dissuades any notion that it is a conventional thriller. Lost in the tedium of their busy schedules, upper class couple Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche) are spooked when a static videotape of their residence is anonymously placed on their doorstep. No note, no demands, just a video. As the frequency of these tapes increases and their content becomes more personal—a turning point comes when a video depicts Georges’ childhood home—their fear turns to paranoia, and finally to panic when their son (Lester Makedonsky) goes missing.

It’s daylight terror, plain and simple. We might ask why this family’s tormentor sent them these tapes in the first place, but the logically prior question is who the culprit is. Haneke leaves this a mystery, as the primary suspect—a former orphan (Maurice Bénichou) that Georges, when aged six, had cunningly prevented his parents from adopting out of jealousy—disintegrates when Georges accuses him. Hasn’t he already suffered enough anguish at Georges’ hand? Georges and Anne receive a video of that encounter, too, and by the film’s unresolved conclusion, the couple’s existentially secure lifestyle as well as their troubled marriage have crumbled.

Analyses have explored this beguiling film from a number of different angles, looking at it through lenses of colonialism and collective guilt (the orphan boy’s Algerian parents had been killed in the Paris massacre of 1961) or mass surveillance in wake of 9/11. However, I found the most edifying approach to be to move past “who sent the videos?”—as Haneke suggests, “if you come out wanting to know who sent the tapes, you didn’t understand the film.”—and consider how their seemingly innocuous existence has such a profound impact on Georges’ psyche.

In Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary, a low budget mockumentary, one of the main character’s friends (Lorenzo Mans) chastises the wannabe filmmaker for his obsession with making his life into a documentary. “As soon as you start filming something, whatever happens in front of the camera isn’t reality anymore,” he says. “Decisions stop being moral and start being aesthetical.” It’s an interesting phenomenon that recalls one of my parents’ methods for correcting poor behavior in their young children, which was to make it understood that even if we could fool them, God always knew when we sinned. God was always watching. This is in a sense the same understanding that comes over Georges when these tapes arrive at his house. They’re not doing anything, really. Merely flipping a switch in his mental circuitry that tells him someone is keeping tabs on him. And so where David Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson) started acting differently because he knew the camera was there, Georges wishes he had known the camera was there so that he could have acted differently—an insight made all the more effective because Georges’ career as a talk show host entails being on camera all the time. Further, as Georges grows increasingly paranoid and begins dredging his memories to consider which past transgression he is being punished for, a fresh wave of guilt delivers considerable agony all on its own. Even so, his engrained prejudices ensure that he’ll repeat his past mistakes, omniscient viewer or not.