This and The White Ribbon! Rulz!

In both Cache and The White Ribbon, Haneke makes it all about the children, but you wouldn't know it. In both movies, the moral is 'you eff with us, and we'll eff with you.'

In The White Ribbon, we encounter preternatural children a la Village of the Damned, almost gliding through their daily activities with dead eyes. They're murderous. Are they a collective evil or a product of 'the sins of the fathers' etc.?
This pre-war setting in a German village was a Petri dish of hypocrisy, suppression, lasciviousness and criminality. All this in the guise of religious piety and material austerity.
To put it simply, the children took matters into their own hands.

Seeing I saw Cache after TWR, I can assume the theme was a predecessor to the latter.

In Cache, we have two self-absorbed parents who only manage a passing interest in their only child, Pierrot.
He's either doing shonky swimming lessons, spending time at his friend's house or waiting for a good haircut.
Dad Georges is busy with his TV show, and ma Anne is busy juggling her work with an extra-marital affair. They are only galvanised into some long forgotten semblance of alertness when they receive the vids and pictures.
Their comfortable ennui is compromised.

And even then, Georges and Anne are odd. Certainly, they are concerned for their safety, jobs and reputations.
But when their son goes missing, they calmly discuss whether or not to call Yves, the friend, to see if he's there.
Then they decide to check his room??! At home! I smell a disconnect here.
Of course, they then get a little mushy and go around Pierrot's room sniffing his stuff ... ah mon fils, mon fils!

The parents were not horrible or overtly abusive; yet this boy was pretty much ignored, extraneous and part of the furniture. Not to mention he'd busted his mother with her lover, which could only serve to exacerbate his hostility and sense of isolation.

Ripe for the picking for anyone with a grudge, who needed an accomplice. Enter attractive, polite son of turkey beheader.That, quite simply, is the meaning here; that a sad 12 yr old boy wants to get back at his parents .. bearing in mind that his father was only 6 yrs old when oh whatever.

I absolutely refute claims that TWR had anything to do with Nazis etc. and that Cache had anything to do with Arabs' disenfranchisement. It's very easy to politicise and unduly analyse the 'meaning' of things and makes for excessive verbage. I believe that Haneke wanted to take the purity of children and show that after a prolonged period of unsustainability, due to adult behaviour, are subject to corruption.

There's an old French lullaby called Au Clair de la Lune, mentioning 'mon ami Pierrot,' which also featured a lot in an old movie called 'The Bad Seed' (another murderous child). The lyrics of this song could be the script for Cache.

Cache was excellent. The White Ribbon was brilliant. Haneke does it simply, without fanfare and with beautiful construction. Best of all, he combines two elements par excellence ... menace and charm.
He's the master.

And be nice to your kiddies, mamans et papas.