In Michael Haneke’s “Cache” (“Hidden”), a bourgeois couple receives videotapes of their home, and the questions that inevitably arise leave exposed lies and recriminations in their wake. Mr. Haneke’s lacerating film powerfully demonstrates how the free-floating anxiety of our age attaches itself to all aspects of our lives. It is within this context, more than the colonialist critique it seems to want to be, that the movie excels.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are French, and one thing kept “hidden” in France is the guilt-ridden legacy of the Algerian conflict. For Georges, it is a personal one: When he was a child, his parents adopted an Algerian orphan, now long since estranged. The tapes, and the violent drawings that accompany them, lead Georges back to this secret memory.

That’s how this “thriller” unfolds. There’s no satisfaction of a visible tor mentor chasing them, only a visually aided menace that gathers in the minds of its protagonists. The tapes, delivered one by one, demonstrate an intimate knowledge about Georges that is far more frightening – an accusatory omniscience.

This clinical narrative voice is familiar from Mr. Haneke’s other works, whether apocalyptic (“Time of the Wolf”), deconstructive (“Funny Games”), or global (“Code Unknown”). It starts with the film’s first shot: a static view of their townhouse on a city backstreet. This is the first of many trompes l’oeil, as we soon realize this footage comes from one of the tapes. Our introduction to Georges and Anne, therefore, has been from the perspective of his tormentor, a voyeur like us.

Georges is certainly tormented, and, in a change for this host of a television talk show, powerless. He tries to trace the source of the tapes, but he mostly ends up lying to his wife. He tracks down a hallway featured in one clip, only to find a calm middle-aged Algerian (Maurice Benichou), whom he threatens. When he walks back from visiting the police, who offer no recourse, he nearly collides with a black bicyclist and almost provokes a fight. You can practically see the urban and racial tensions metastasize. “Cache” was released in France before the riots – the scene would play much differently now.

This constant trauma pervades the film, which Mr. Haneke booby-traps with sudden acts of violence.The most extreme, devastating and yet eerily beautiful, occurs in a relentless single take not unlike the surveillance footage. As Georges scurries about, it is as if his frustration also arises from being consciously organized into a narrative, in this case one that implicates him. The polite, respectable, genteelly evasive couple that Mr. Auteuil and Ms. Binoche give us are inheritors to a problem greater than both of them, but they are also subject to forces (and a director) intent upon proving their complicity.

***

The latest work of pure cinema by visionary French director Claire Denis has emerged at last from the wilderness of non-distribution. The pervasive mood of stoic solitude, the splendor of her compositions, and the lack of exposition together give “The Intruder” the feel of an elliptical flashback contemplated at leisure.

Indeed, the movie’s narrative drift (not drive) looks backward: We follow a majestic old hulk of a man attempting a late revision of body and spirit. A wealthy recluse, Louis (Michel Subor) lives in a spare woodland cabin somewhere on the Swiss borderlands. His heart failing, he seeks a transplant, which he obtains illicitly. One ache awakens another, and a new quest resolves itself, to find an estranged son in Tahiti.

Louis is a selfish but noble figure who for years has done whatever he pleased. He first appears as a grave, corpulent mass, lazing naked with two dogs on a scrabbly lakeside. His groans from heart pains echo across the water. Weakened but not weak, he thinks nothing of slitting the throat of a nighttime intruder, or suiting up for a business deal in Pusan.

It would be misleading to probe Louis’s psychology, however, when the heart of the movie lies with the images of cinematographer Agnes Godard. Her portraiture of Louis and the landscapes he traverses, particularly the silvery expanse of the ocean, supply the rich vocabulary for Ms. Denis’s unique idiom.