The Eventless Violence of Caché
Michael Haneke examines a society drowning in images, where trauma, guilt, and violence are no longer transformative—just repetitive signals in an infinite loop.
There is a brief, almost throwaway moment in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), where the academic milieu clusters inside the almost insultingly modern Laurent family home, and one barely-audible guest name-drops Baudrillard. That barely acknowledged reference, buried under wine glasses and shallow chattering, feels perversely apt: Caché is a film that demands Baudrillardian analysis, because it is a film about a world where the difference between the real and the image has collapsed into a feedback loop.
On the recommendation of two friends, I caught the film for my first watch at ACMI during their companion screenings to Melbourne Cinémathèque’s 2025 season on Haneke. I’m glad that, before seeing the film, I was not familiar with the plot or the discussion around its ‘thriller’ conceits. If I had been expecting a thriller-like crescendo, I might have failed to appreciate that the real power of Caché is that it does not allow the Laurent family home to be “invaded” or anything of the sort. The menacing tapes seep in, the guilt seeps in, but the walls remain standing. Haneke’s characters absorb the event and carry on—a little more hollow and absurd. This is not the drama of the thriller, where detection leads to unmasking or revenge. Here, the event itself is suspended, endlessly deferred, until it becomes indistinguishable from its very circulation.
The Laurent family, on which the film is centred—Georges (Daniel Auteuil), an established television literary critic, Anne (Juliette Binoche), a book publisher, and their adolescent son and Eminem fan, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky)—live in a pristine, aggressively modernist home packed with books, glass surfaces, and curated art. Their existence inside this virtual culturo-architectural fortress against the real is orderly, stereotypical, and self-sufficient. But one day, they begin receiving anonymous videotapes: long, static shots of their home’s exterior, with no threats, demands, or explanation. Sometimes the tapes arrive accompanied by crude, childlike drawings of bloodied figures. No direct violence ever breaches their lives, yet the implied threat gnaws at their complacency.
Gradually, we learn that Georges suspects the supposed sender of these tapes is Majid (Maurice Bénichou), an Algerian man whose life was once intimately, and shamefully, entwined with Georges’ own childhood. Decades earlier, Majid’s parents were among some 200 murdered by French police in the brutal repression of Algerian protests in Paris (a factual atrocity, known as the Paris Massacre of 1961), and he was taken in by Georges’ family—before Georges, out of jealous cruelty, orchestrated his removal. The tapes appear to dredge this buried guilt back into the Laurent household, forcing Georges into an increasingly desperate, solipsistic spiral. But Haneke is careful to refuse the pleasures of traditional suspense. The tapes do not build toward confrontation or catharsis. They simply accumulate, like sediment, layering the Laurent’s life with a darkness they cannot expel. The Laurent home was already a soundstage of sorts. The tapes only force them to glimpse it.
You can trace the simulation everywhere. The books and DVDs stacked high in the Laurents’ multi-storey home aren’t evidence of a vibrant intellectual life—they’re its alibi. A library of inert signals, desperately curated to cover up a more profound nihilism. Culture becomes a prophylactic against responsibility. The home’s sterile modernism only hardens the sense that whatever life once animated it has long since been processed into image management. The Laurents decorate their home as such because they’re the kind of people who are supposed to live in a house like that, you see?
Meanwhile, Majid’s flat is stripped to its bare necessities: a table, a bed, and a few appliances. It is a functional, exhausted space. There is no surplus of culture or memory to conceal the economic and historical violence written into its walls and inhabitants—just survival.
Baudrillard’s analysis of simulation helps anchor this precisely. In his work, most famously Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard argues that signs no longer refer to reality, but to other signs. Representation no longer masks reality—it masks the absence of reality. Images no longer represent; they reproduce and amplify themselves. The Laurent family is the human residue of this process: they live but do not experience. They act, but they do not intervene. Their social class floats unmoored from any concrete reverberations, governed instead by the creeping inertia of appearances.
Georges’ profession as a television host is not incidental. His job is to produce commentary without consequence, language without stakes. He packages literature into morsels for broadcast that avoid becoming “too theoretical”, ensuring that culture becomes another surface of self-soothing consumption. It is precisely because Georges has lived so long within this ecosystem of signs that when the tapes arrive—anonymous, directionless, implacable—he has no defences. He can only search for an “explanation”, as if assembling narrative fragments would somehow allow him to resist the system that has already absorbed him.
It is not so much guilt for his past wrongs against Majid that consumes Georges as it is his lack of embodied guilt. Not guilt as a feeling, but guilt as a structure. Perhaps this lack of guilt generates a kind of debt that the debtor can never pay—only internalise. It is no coincidence that the pivotal scene in which the Laurents realise their son, Pierrot, is missing takes place within a living room tableau polluted by television news and, most critically, financial documents: bills, ledgers, accounting—all splayed before Georges in a comically insurmountable pile.
When the search for narrative fails to produce closure, when his personal threats fall flat, Georges falls back on the final defence of the middle-class subjectivity under late liberalism: he invokes the machinery of the state. He sics the police—the institutional arm of erasure, suppression and blame displacement—onto Majid and his son, hoping to restore the stability of his curated cocoon by reasserting blunt hierarchical force. It is an act of profound cowardice, yet entirely logical within the parameters of his existence. Georges does not engage with reality; he seeks only to have it administered.
Majid’s suicide, then, is not a rupture. It is the consummation of this process. Georges arrives at Majid’s apartment, is forced to witness the act, yet nothing follows. No confession. No reckoning. No transformation. Georges returns home. The camera stares. The footage plays back endlessly in our minds: Georges, Majid, his blood spurting across stale furnishings. But the world does not change. Reality, such as it was, is incapable of reasserting itself. Even an act of extreme violence cannot disrupt the Laurent family’s aestheticised state of anxious inertia. At worst, it folds into a managed disturbance without any accompanying movement. What would otherwise constitute an event does not break the simulation but is metabolised into it.
This is where the film tips into Baudrillardian territory—not in the academic sense, but in the nausea of being surrounded by signs that signify nothing. The tapes are a pure simulation: a representation of something that never announces itself. Haneke himself seems, more than once, to draw attention to himself as the filmmaker via these tapes, as if to empty them of their appearance as plot objects. The most crucial instance is Majid’s suicide itself, which Haneke shoots identically to the most chilling of the tapes Georges receives. This time, and for a split second, Haneke employs slow motion as the blade crosses Majid’s throat. The image doesn’t mediate reality. It replaces it, and in doing so, strips it of immediacy and consequence. That’s why the violence in Caché is so disorienting—not because it’s sudden, but because it feels unmoored from the affect that’s supposed to accompany it. It’s not shocking, but inappropriate. The slow-motion slash arrives like a glitch in the simulation, and then the image settles again, perfectly composed, unaffected.
Because what Caché reveals, and what Baudrillard understood with brutal clarity, is that exposure no longer destabilises a system built on the endless reproduction of non-events. Just as, for Baudrillard, the Gulf War “did not take place” in any meaningful sense because it was already absorbed into the media apparatus before it began, the shames haunting Georges’ life are already processed, neutered, and formatted by Haneke for endless involution. Recognition does not produce reckoning where repression is no longer even necessary. The scandal is not what is hidden (as the story progresses, it is not even hidden from Georges’ employer). The scandal is that revelation itself has been neutered, something palmed off to lawyers.
And this is the ultimate degradation: no threshold exists where a ‘real event’ might intervene and collapse the system’s internal logics. In the framework Caché builds and sustains, what would usually form a singularity is rendered a mere protocol of grievance, an element in the greater governance of erasure. The camera stares. The characters react. The audience waits. But no synthesis emerges. No historical debt is called in. No symbolic reparation is conceivable. The tapes do not haunt because they accuse—they create a field of endless referentiality where every action collapses back into the system itself.
Haneke is merciless in depicting this collapse. Georges’ visit to his mother (Annie Girardot) is a grotesque banality: she is alive but vacant, a fossil of the past he wishes to forget. When he insists to her, almost defensively, that he is fine, his wife is fine, his son is fine, the sterility of their lives is exposed. It is not happiness he asserts, but the absence of disturbance. Fine: meaning numb. Fine: meaning empty. Fine: meaning the system endures unmolested, unexamined.
In this sense, Caché is not a film about guilt or memory. It is about the exhaustion of the event itself. It is about a society so saturated in images that no act—no confession, no confrontation, no suicide—can reintroduce definition. Every trauma is archived before it is lived. If we follow the logic further, the figure of Georges does not represent a flawed individual grappling with private guilt, but a model of the modern subject paralysed by the suspension of meaning. His oscillation between denial, anger, paranoia and helplessness is not character development—it is a cartography of contemporary affect, where every possible reaction has already been anticipated, encoded, and rendered harmless. The system no longer traffics in consequences, only in exposures without effect.
Baudrillard, writing on the phenomenon of Islamist suicide bombers in the early 2000s, argued that within a global system of hyperreality, where all symbolic gestures had been wrung out, only the reintroduction of death—literal, unassimilable death—could constitute an actual event. The suicide bomber represented an “impossible exchange”: a symbolic rupture so absolute that the system, however sophisticated, could not fully imbibe it. It was a desperate, horrifying attempt to force the symbolic back into a world that had evacuated it.
But Caché goes further. In Haneke’s vision, death itself no longer possesses that impossible density. Majid’s suicide, filmed in a single, motionless shot, repels transcendence. It does not shatter the Laurent family’s constructed world. It produces no irreversible consequences. It is processed into the same flow of mediated symbols: footage, memory, guilt, anxiety, while the objective order remains roughly as it was at the film’s beginning. In Caché, a suicide openly declared to harm another is de-symbolised and rendered inert. Majid’s body falls, the blood pools, yet Haneke’s film absorbs it seamlessly.
Even the children, often the site where bourgeois cinema deposits its last hopes for redemption, are framed without sentimentality. Pierrot’s growing estrangement from his parents is neither framed as a tragedy, nor a seed of future rebellion. It is simply another dull inevitability, another signal drifting across the predictable circuits of family life. By the film’s credits scene, when Majid’s son (Walid Afkir) and Pierrot seem to meet outside the school, Haneke stages a final provocation. The camera watches, patient and unblinking, refusing revelation. Nothing definite. No future. Only another set of images, ambiguous and weightless, entering circulation.
What Haneke is offering is a perfectly self-enclosed feedback loop bearing eerie similarities to our everyday lives. The surveillance tapes, the news broadcasts, the hollow rituals of family and career all operate on this logic. Memory, violence, forgetting—all bleed into the same endless, shimmering surface. It is a cinema not of witnessing but of saturation, a cinema where the attempt to locate meaning is a reflex already anticipated and neutralised. In Haneke’s design, our natural desire to see substantive intervention is a frustrated juvenilia.
The horror is not that we cannot see, or that we do not know.
The horror is that we all see, we all know, and nothing changes.
I have to say that this is the first commentary on CACHÉ I have read that captures my experience of the film. Thank you for finding the words.