Director: Alexandre Aja (France). Year of Release: 2003
A corn field where the plants are taller than a person. A young short-haired woman in a grey T-shirt runs as quickly as she can holding her chest which is bleeding profusely. A makeshift bandage covers a similar wound on her arm. As her pursuer gains ground, she runs into a road, standing in front of a car and forcing it to swerve and stop. She jumps into the back of the car, telling the driver to take her away. He fumbles with his key as the ignition fails to start.
Marie wakes up, lying in the back of a car. She calls on the driver to give her first a cigarette, then a light. But the driver is no longer a man, but Alex, Marie’s friend and fellow-student. They are driving to Alex’s family in the middle of nowhere so that they can study for coming exams. It will be more healthy for Marie to meet Alex’s parents and cowboy-emulating younger brother than to spend too much time with the nightmares which have been recently plaguing her.
When they reach Alex’s house in the middle of the night, the young women chat while Alex’s dad goes into his office downstairs to do some work. Alex confesses that she fancies a bloke who’s been seeing a Brazilian woman for the last few months. Marie still hasn’t found a man who’s right for her. If you didn’t get the hint from her short hair, when she goes out for a smoke, she stares lasciviously through the upstairs window at Alex having a shower,
Meanwhile, the camera hones in on a man in a truck. It wasn’t clear to me whether he was pleasuring himself or getting a blowjob. Either way, he soon tosses the severed head of a young woman out of his van. It won’t be long before the man knocks on Alex’s door, interrupting Marie who’s having a sly frig, before butchering Alex’s family and gagging and locking Alex in chains then hurling her into the back of his truck and driving her away.
High Tension is a film of two halves, or rather a film of the first 80% or so, then of the completely different direction it goes into once a “surprize twist” is revealed towards the end. Let’s deal with these one at a time, because to a large extent we are dealing with two quite different films.
For most of the film, I was very impressed by the acting, the use of music, and the fact that from the very first minute the tension was and remained exceedingly high. It is extremely good at what it does. At the same time, what it does is not qualitatively different to the slasher films and video nasties of the 1980s when an overweight man in overalls and a baseball cap walks slowly with a knife in his hand through a silent house while women much younger than him run away.
There has been some discussion recently about “elevated horror”, a term which some horror fans reject as being patronising. Some horror films have always shown social upheavals – the US army’s implosion in Vietnam was not just reflected in independent films like Bonnie and Clyde and Taxi Driver but also horrors like The Exorcist and The Wicker Man. Nonetheless, the last decade has seen horrors like Babadook and Get Out which have addressed social issues much more directly.
Little of this is seen in High Tension which is, in the main, a colour by numbers tale of young women running away from a scary man. There is nothing wrong with this as such – this is a very stylish film which pulls off the clichés of the genre with great aplomb. You care for the characters and share their fear. But for most of the time, you never have the sense that anything new or original is happening here.
And then everything is flipped in a way which is difficult to explain without plot spoilers, but I’ll do my best. You can see why the writers and director do what they do – they subvert everything we have believed to be happening in a way which feels effortlessly cool. But if you just stop to think a minute, the rest of the film no longer makes any sense. There’s also something more worrying which I won’t name explicitly but if you want to avoid any plot spoilery, skip the next paragraph.
Much horror is based on the very real fear that women have of violence and worse from alienated men. You could argue that horror films sidestep the fact that most violence comes from men who women knew already, but that’s not the real point. The imbalance in power between men and women engenders a very real fear. But if you take High Tension’s “twist” to its logical conclusion, this fear is misplaced. The real danger comes not from violent men but from possessive lesbians.
Now I don’t think that the film makers deliberately set out to make a film with such reactionary undertones, but this is the problem. This feels like a film which was made by someone who spent too much time at film school – full of neat “look at me” tricks, but lacking an internal coherence or any real idea what it wants to say. This leads to a film which is in equal parts impressive and frustrating. Many of the individual scenes work very well, but it fails to pull together as a whole.
Having said all this, High Tension is full of potential for something which could be very good indeed. The music is superb – both the diagetic music – especially an early scene in which the 2 woman sing along to shit French pop music while tapping the roof of the car – and the interstitial music which ratchets up the tension. And, for reasons I can’t fully articulate, I found the acting, especially Cécile de France as Marie, to be superb. So give it a go, despite its obvious limitations.
CinePhil 