Like a young Haley Joel Osment, Dakota Fanning is a creepily precocious tyke whose manner often suggests a dour, depressed 40-year-old stuck in a child's body. So it was perhaps inevitable that she'd eventually wind up in her own Sixth Sense knockoff. In the derivative, portentous creep show Hide And Seek, Fanning plays a spooky child with an intimate connection to sinister, mysterious forces. Once again whoring out his talent to the highest bidder, a slumming Robert De Niro co-stars as Fanning's rattled, pudgy, similarly grim father, a shrink with a shaky grasp on his own daughter's psychology. Following his wife's suicide, De Niro moves himself and his daughter out of the city, but Fanning responds poorly to her new environment. Ghostly pale and gothed-up like someone auditioning for a spot in the Addams Family, she scares off potential chums, issues cryptic pronouncements, and communicates mainly with a sinister fellow named "Charlie," who has a possibly murderous grudge against De Niro. De Niro desperately strives to get through to the tormented Fanning, but just seems to be pushing her further into the realm of madness.
Like far too many junky post-Sixth Sense thrillers, Hide And Seek essentially exists for the sake of its third-act plot twist, but the climactic revelation merely pushes it from bad to worse. If Hide And Seek had any dignity, it would end immediately following its anticlimax, but instead it slogs on for a seeming eternity, with each successive minute serving as a further insult to its audience's intelligence. A tawdry cocktail of red herrings, cheap psychology, and shameless horror-movie tropes, Hide And Seek not only boasts the lamest plot twist since Secret Window, it boasts the exact same plot twist as Secret Window, a third-act switcheroo that's as groaningly predictable as it is cheap. M. Night Shyamalan, what have you wrought?