High Tension

A dubbed French import from 2003, High Tension is a damnably tricky film to categorize. As an experiment in off-Hollywood slasher style, it has a lot going for it. The plotting is tight, but at times it’s just too precious for its own good.

Hopefully, the wild parrots will stay out of her way.

The setup is classic slasher film: College girls head out to the French countryside for the summer. Twenty minutes of setup with soon-to-be-gutted family members and more than a little girl-on-girl fantasizing ensue. Then Psycho Redneck shows up in his Murdermobile and starts hacking people apart.
As an exercise in style, it’s a tightly assembled little thriller. Director Alexandre Aja does an excellent job of making the characters realistic, terrified and scrabbling around in absolute desperation. It’s what most of us would do in a slasher situation. We wouldn’t be superheroes, slow-mo diving across the screen as we go after the killer with the weapon we’ve finally gotten at hand. We’d be SCARED.

What makes this film noteworthy is the gore. Squishy, grisly, crunchy, gooshy gore of a style you just don’t see in America.

Problem is, it has so very little new to offer. So many of the takes are things we’ve seen before: the girl is under the bed, the killer is searching the room, something creaks, WILL HE SEE HER? Aja stages these conventions in excruciatingly tense and frightening ways, but it’s still same old-same old.
The story is told in flashback, which puts us in an interesting position: We know our heroine is going to make it out alive, but not without a whooole lot of extreme ugliness in the process.

SPOILER ALERT: But that flashback is a dandy little tool to cover up the last-reel twist that sends the movie into a hard tailspin toward Twilight Zone/David Lynch territory. On one level it’s a sharp piece of plotting; on another it’s total self-indulgence and goes to pieces the more you analyze it in relation to the rest of the film. And I’m not even getting into the very ugly gender stereotypes it may or may not be trying to play with, which get more unpleasant the more they are examined.

By the way, in some countries it was titled Switchblade Romance, which for my money is at least 20 times better than the title it ended up with.