Emily Calloway's mommy is dead. She slit her wrists in the bathtub, and Emily (Dakota Fanning) saw her lying in the bloody water. With her whole world gone, Emily withdraws from the real one; she rarely speaks and stares into space. There's no room in Emily's heart for games anymore: not even hide-and-seek, which she and her mother used to play.

Her father David (Robert De Niro) is a psychologist, but not even he knows how to help her. Against the advice of Emily's therapist (Famke Janssen), he moves with his daughter to an out-of-the-way summer community called Woodland, in hopes that the countryside will bring back the giggly little girl he's lost. Emily is reticent at first--when her dad tries to talk to her at dinner, she says, "I'd like to go to bed now"--but soon, the plan seems to be working.

"I have a new friend," Emily announces one night, smiling. "He told me to call him Charlie."

After some fatherly suspicion (they've met plenty of strange men in these parts), David realizes that Charlie is imaginary. And though he wishes Emily would confide in him instead of making up a whole other person to talk to, he accepts Charlie as a coping mechanism: David's a psychologist, after all. But then disturbing messages appear in the shower, Emily starts dressing up in her mother's clothes, and someone drowns the cat. And whenever he asks Emily about the increasingly bizarre things going on, she always says, "It wasn't me, Daddy. It was Charlie."

Hide and Seek is a great movie...for about the first 80 minutes, anyway. It spends more time developing its mood and its characters than bombarding us with fake scares. (Even the sole cat-in-the-closet scene shows us a lot about David's parental clumsiness and Emily's pain). There's not a lot of violence or even much of a body count, but the film never feels slow. Most of its action takes place almost subconsciously: strange men look too closely into a child's face; little girls stand alone in the woods; fathers keep trying to become dead mothers in an effort to reach out. Little things like this make us nervous, and Hide and Seek is full of them. Disturbing details come at us one after another, subtly but as constant as jokes in a Marx Brothers film. This movie is creepy as hell-and Charlie hasn't even been introduced yet.

It's creepy because Hide and Seek's characters are people to us--especially Emily, who's the cornerstone of the film. She could've easily been turned into a "clockwork orange": someone so bombarded with pain that she becomes robotic, a series of behaviors instead of a human being. But Fanning never lets Emily lose her humanity. Her facial expressions are subdued, but her feelings are poignant: her eyelids droop sadly, she wrinkles her nose at strangers, and when she talks about Charlie, a smile plays at the corners of her mouth.

In the same way, screenwriter Ari Schlossinger makes Emily's few words valuable. "You shouldn't be here," Emily tells a chatty girl who comes to visit. "You could get hurt." Her language is always heavy with emotion, even when her voice and facial expressions are not.

Though I connected strongly with Emily, her father was much harder to read. David loves his daughter, surely, and wants to keep her safe. But something was missing--something just as fundamental to the father-daughter relationship as love and protection. David wants to connect with his daughter, but is more comfortable recording Emily's "significant difficulty with her transition" in a journal than he is spending time with her. He's always asking Emily to discuss her feelings, but he never talks to her. He doesn't play, he doesn't watch her cartoons, and he doesn't even keep an eye on her very well. David tries to be Emily's mother and then her psychologist, but never really tries to be her dad.

Other people encroach upon the solitude that David's built for himself and his child, but only two manage to infiltrate it. One is Elizabeth Young (Elizabeth Shue), a "friend" whose feelings for David simmer, but never erupt. The other is Charlie.

Who is Charlie? Although he keeps his identity secret for most of the film, he's definitely not shy. He elbows into the Calloway family, creating a love triangle where he vies with David for Emily's affection. Not since George and Martha's "son" in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has an invisible character had so much centrifugal force.

Unfortunately, Hide and Seek loses its grip when Charlie steps into the light. The film's twist is perfect, but I'd seen it done in another movie the year before. Even so, I don't think it would matter what Charlie ended up being: just knowing his identity is like when a magician explains a really cool trick. Charlie's like a shadow on a child's bedroom wall-terrifying because you don't know what he is.

Hide and Seek's climax wouldn't have been so disappointing had the rest of it not been so damn good. Fanning and De Niro have a genuine filial chemistry. When David kisses the top of Emily's head before she goes to sleep, I forgot they were in front of a camera. And, really, who doesn't want to see Robert "Taxi Driver" De Niro make a googly face?

Not only is Hide and Seek a good movie, for the most part; the film's presentation is very good, too. Scenes are crisp and clear, and director John Polson and his crew have done excellent work with light and shadows here. Also, Dakota Fanning's dark hair (which is a wig) brings out the blue in her eyes. Looking into her face is like drowning in a hungry sea.

Audio is also good. Hide and Seek has both Dolby Digital Surround and 5.1 DTS tracks. Besides the commentary with director John Polson, screenwriter Schlossberg and film editor Jeffrey Ford, extras include 14 deleted/extended scenes, storyboard sequences, a "making-of" featurette that doesn't overstay its welcome, and--perhaps most interesting of all--four alternate endings. These endings don't affect the preceding story, but do leave the audience with various degrees of disquiet. (My favorites are the "One Final Game" and "Emily's Fate," but I'm a morbid little monster like that). You can even see your favorite ending in context, by choosing one of five "versions" of the film.

Its surprise may be a day late and a dollar short, but Hide and Seek is still one of my favorite movies of 2005. The movie's a lot more fun the second time around, and Fox's DVD release makes watching it again a pleasure. So curl up with your angry imaginary friend and enjoy. Make sure to sleep with the door open, though.