After a puzzling opening involving two young boys, in a wilderness near a highway, with a resulting car crash thanks in part to one of the children running across the road in front of an oncoming semi, Pål Øie's Skjult(Hidden) introduces us to Kai Koss, who has returned to his home after a 19 year absence because his mother has passed on. He wears the baggage of an obviously traumatic past on his weary face. There's an anger very present as we see him snap his mother's dead finger with pleasure, announcing to her that she will burn. He proceeds, two gasoline canisters in hand, with plans to set his wretched mother's house, which is falling apart and in ruin, on fire. Fortunate for the house, a female cop, Sara(Cecilie A Mosli), who once knew Kai, interferes before he can commence with such plans. Staying in a hotel near his home, it's not long until two teenagers come up missing, and he becomes a suspect since nothing was wrong until he returned. He doesn't make friends(Kai is not a people person)and as a search party works throughout the wilderness, Kai informs Sara that Peter is the one responsible for what is transpiring.
The movie certainly implicates Kai for the murders committed in the film. He was at the house when the mortician's daughter and her boyfriend were rambling about inside. His hallucinations of his mother, and possibly Peter, the brother Kai believes never fell to his doom down the waterfall. His presence when two are searching through Kai's house for any clues regarding the two kids gone missing. The heart wrenching fact that Kai was tormented as a child, never to grow into a functional human being. Perhaps after failed foster care and adoptions, he had somehow integrated into society, Kai's return to the place which had left him a scarred and broken man certainly isn't good for the soul. He's anti-social, never able, it seems, to even crack a smile, miserable and haunted, Kristopher Loner's eyes alone tell all we need to know, if the burns on different parts of the body aren't enough. We see the secret room, hidden away in the basement of the house, the perfect place to torture someone and not get caught. This room itself is quite foreboding, a prison where no one can hear you scream. The ominous figure in a red hoody, ever present, yet photographed as if an apparition, it's hard not to ponder if this is Peter or a personality adopted by Kai's damaged psyche. The murders are definitely real, sharpened sticks stabbing into victims unaware of the killer just behind them..the question is whether Peter is real or just Kai masquerading as him, not knowing it is he who is actually the one killing folks.
Exquisitely photographed by Sjur Aarthun, who has an effective way of capturing Loner's face and the atmospheric surroundings of the wilderness and Kai's mother's creepy house(which seems to represent the ugliness and sinister nature of it's former owner), methodically paced, and director Pål Øie gradually develops Kai's dilemma as signs of his guilt build against him. What I think is Skjult's greatest success if how we sympathize with the lead character because of what he had to endure as a child, understanding just why he's a tortured soul with little room to wiggle out of his inevitable plight..so few are able to escape from such experiences, evolving into a normal person without mental hang-ups. There's enough ambiguity present, questioning what is real and unreal in regards to certain occurrences involving Kai, what he sees, and who are affected by his return home. What is always certain is that Kai's fate seems destined to end in tragedy..he may've escaped from the room which kept him prisoner, but Kai was never really free.
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