HIDE
2020 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Daniel Gray
Genres: drama, family, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A childhood game of hide-and-seek stretches across decades, becoming a heartrending story of family and disconnection.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Hide-and-seek as a metaphor for family estrangement is exactly the kind of high-concept premise that could feel suffocating in lesser hands, but Gray's surrealist texture keeps it from collapsing into greeting-card sentimentality—this needed teeth, and it's got it.
The formal architecture here is exquisite: a childhood game refracted through decades of absence, each edit a deliberate choice in how time folds back on itself, positioning Gray squarely in the lineage of Hou Hsiao-hsien and contemporary experimental narratives about memory and duration.
The masterstroke is the decision to let the hide-and-seek structure *literally* become the film's grammar rather than abandon it for conventional flashback—that singular formal commitment transforms an 11-minute budget into something that feels inevitable and unrepeatable.