No cut to comprehension: adjudication in Michael Haneke’s Caché

This article argues that Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005) is best understood not simply as a film about surveillance, guilt and the afterlife of the French–Algerian War, but as a formal inquiry into the failure of adjudication. Rather than positioning ambiguity as an endpoint, the article reads it as the mechanism through which Caché prevents the image from functioning as a secure site of proof, judgement and settlement. Bringing Adorno’s ethics of non-identity into tension with Baudrillard’s account of hyperreality, the article proposes a non-syncretic division of labour between them: Adorno clarifies why injury cannot be turned into closure without distortion, while Baudrillard explains why the image can no longer secure the authority such closure would require. Through close readings of six sequences – from the opening surveillance view to the schoolyard epilogue – the analysis shows how the film repeatedly blocks the movement by which images are expected to prove, assign and conclude. In this account, Caché does not simply leave spectators unsure; it reorganises spectatorship around the failure of visual settlement, showing that once the image can no longer close the case, responsibility cannot be discharged through looking alone.