Hide and Seek, the American Remake

For a property development heir like Noah Blackwell, squatters are about the scariest thing he could imagine, except for maybe his estranged and disturbed brother Jacob, who happens to be both. Blackwell also starts to suspect his brother might also be a murderer. Regardless, the violent and dirty squatters he encounters are sufficiently sinister to alarm any parent in Joel David Moore’s Hide and Seek, a new remake of Huh Jung’s infinitely superior Korean film of the same title, which releases Friday in theaters and on-demand.

Blackwell still carries a lot of guilt over what went down between him and his brother. The family legal advisor Collin Carmichael encourages him to move on, while inadvertently guilt-tripping him worse. Looking for some kind of closure, Blackwell seeks Jacob at his last known address, a lawless slum building slated to be converted into a property that wouldn’t require a tetanus shot after visiting. Moore’s adapted screenplay suggests this is a bad thing, because it is “gentrification.” It also happens to be the same building where the woman of the prologue was killed by a faceless assailant in a motorcycle helmet.

Soon, Blackwell is chasing after the mystery cyclist, believing the unknown figure is his brother. However, the killer is much more effective following Blackwell. So much so, the well-heeled Noah starts noticing the same crude markings notating the occupants of the apartments in his tony building that were also scrawled around the doors of Jacob’s squat tenement.

The Korean Hide and Seek is not exactly Miss Grandpa, but Moore’s film represents its second international remake, following a Chinese version in 2016. In this case, it completely fails to match the suspense and intensity of the original, despite remaining surprisingly faithful to Huh’s narrative.