From the Norwegian creative team behind the effective, if hardly original, horror genre piece Dark Woods (aka Villmark), Hidden (aka Skjult) is another earnest attempt to export a Norwegian shocker overseas. More ambitious than its predecessor, Hidden holds up much better to close scrutiny…

Kai Koss (Kristoffer Joner) unwillingly returns to his home town on the Norwegian west coast to organise the affairs of his recently deceased mother. It is quickly established, given his insistence on sorting his legacy and leaving the place as soon as possible, that Kai the youth had a destructive relationship with his gruesome parent and that, 19 years on, Kai the man is still not ready to come to terms with the events that drove him from his childhood home. Painful memories resurface, just as disturbing occurences overtake the dilapidated house in which Kai once lived, and the ominous woods which surround it…

There is much to recommend in Hidden, not least the teasingly metaphorical use of the crumbling house of Kai’s youth and the forbidden forest, but also including the uneasy score by Trond Bjerknæs, the excellently unsettling sound design by Hugo Ekornes and the cinematography of Sjur Aarthuns which incessantly suggests that something bad is about to happen. Kristoffer Joner, despite seeming to be cast in every Norwegian horror film going, offers a nicely nuanced and crucially empathetic turn as the troubled Kai who, like the house from which he is trying to escape, holds plenty of sequestered secrets.

Running at a trim 96 minutes, the tension is established in the opening scenes and doesn’t languish in longeurs at any time. The narrative counts on the audience expecting the jumps to come regular as clockwork and, this respect, Hidden doesn’t disappoint. Directing from his own script (co-written with Brio Flint), Pål Øie is an assured filmmaker and, instead of the shocks and scares being constructed of the stale and the overly familiar, leaves plenty of room for interpretation in the story’s twists and turns. Where Dark Woods suddenly came unstuck in the final reel confusedly trying to be too many things to too many audiences, Hidden continues its own interal logic through to the very final image.