As we watch the characters watch themselves being watched, the whole thing feels less Lynchian, more Foucaultian in spirit.

The work of Michael Haneke tends to distill social commentary out of portraits of extreme psychological desperation.

A master of the art of snaring the audience’s nerves and taking complete control over its emotions, Haneke isn’t afraid of dropping this Aristotelian poetics mode at a moment’s notice, just to screw with your head a little more, as in the classic remote control scene in “Funny Games,” where one of the characters rewinds its own narrative with the click of a button to change its outcome.

Haneke fluctuates between completely submerging the audience in his world of emotional perversions (and social provocations) and letting it know once in a while that it is, in fact, just a movie. A true exercise in authorial sadism from his part, and cinematic masochism from ours.

It isn’t much different with “Caché” (“Hidden”), for which he won the Best Director prize in this year’s Cannes Film Festival and collected a few others at last week’s European Film Awards.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil, France’s new Depardieu) hosts a literary TV show and lives a flawlessly bourgeois life with his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche, who accepted the part before even reading the script) and his son Pierrot.

But the apparent order of things go awry once Georges starts receiving VHS tapes in the mail containing surveillance of his own life: footage of the street where he lives, the house where he grew up, and the like.

As we watch the characters watch themselves being watched, the whole thing feels less Lynchian, more Foucaultian in spirit. Perhaps also Freudian. Someone is always watching you, literally and psychologically, “Caché” seems to say. The system and the superego share the same self-interested intentions after all.

But besides poking fun at the sterile superficiality of the Parisian literary bourgeoisie — a contemporary French cinema favorite (think Agnès Jaoui’s “Look at Me”) — Haneke fails to infuse his characters with much more depth than he seems to criticize them for lacking in the first place.

While the characters in “Code Unknown” and “Funny Games” (and to some degree “The Piano Teacher”) convinced us of their vulnerability, the people in “Caché” are too obviously serving some social archetype role for us to actually believe in their humanity.

And if Haneke cannot persuade us into accepting his puppets’ frailties, he undermines the very core of his work: the capability to make the suffering on the screen the audience’s very own suffering.

This will become clearer once a suspect for being the sender of the surveillance tapes emerges, and he is an Algerian immigrant with an unresolved past involving Georges.

Here the whole story starts smelling too much like social fable: privileged white European pretending joy versus unavoidable victimization of exploited émigré.

And while the film’s political explorations make sense, they come across as more rhetorical than filmic, more didactic than subtle. What happened to the visceral cinematic experience a Haneke film was supposed to cause?

Suddenly the film feels like a frustrated attempt of a Haneke film, a failure to launch, an overtly rehearsed provocation, an ersatz incitement. Like going to an S-and-M club, expecting whips and chains and ending up receiving a half-assed spanking.

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