High Tension (2003) [Blu-ray]
Horror | Thriller
Tagline: Hearts will bleed.... [and minds will rebel]
Marie and Alexia are classmates and best friends. Hoping to prepare for their college exams in peace and quiet, they decide to spend a weekend in the country at Alexia's parents' secluded farmhouse. But in the dead of night, a stranger knocks on the front
door. And with the first swing of his knife, the girls' idyllic weekend turns into an endless night of horror...
Storyline: Alexia travels with her friend Marie to spend a couple of days with her family in their farm in the country. They arrive late and they are welcomed by Alexia's father. Late in the night, a sadistic and sick killer
breaks into the farmhouse, slaughters Alexia's family--including their dog--and kidnaps Alexia. Marie hides from the criminal and tries to help the hysterical and frightened Alexia, chase the maniac, and disclose his identity in the end. Written by
Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman on September 12, 2010 -- Is Alexandre Aja serious? The French director, who rose to fame, of a certain order at least, with the release of High Tension in 2003, and then went
on to helm Mirrors and The Hills Have Eyes, proclaims his surprise in one of the extras on this Blu-ray that so many people found High Tension "gory and violent." Aja then goes on to link "true" goriness with comedy, averring that
that kind of goriness is nowhere to be found in his film. If one takes his hypothesis as correct (pretty doubtful, frankly), then one has to agree with Aja, for High Tension is certainly one of the grimmest, most humorless horror films ever
released. But as to a more commonly accepted definition of gore, let's just recount a few images from this film. In general terms, a family is slaughtered one by one in some of the most explicitly bloody and violent scenes in recent memory. Specifically,
we get one victim sliced with a razor, then impaled between two banisters on a staircase and summarily decapitated by a chest of drawers. Another victim has her throat sliced open seemingly to the vertebrae, with attendant spurting blood covering every
wall in the room. Our erstwhile heroine suffers the slings and arrows of several bloody incidents, leaving her largely unrecognizable underneath the carnage inflicted on her body and face. Comic? Hardly. Gory? You be the judge.
High Tension takes the time honored trope of placing an innocent family in an isolated location, introduces an insane and seemingly random killer in their midst, and then lets the blood fly where it will. There's little motive or logic given in the
screenplay by Aja and his collaborator Gregory Levasseur, but of course there never has to be in films like this. The point is to get to the mayhem, and Aja does that relatively painlessly (no pun intended). College friends (or are they more than that?)
Marie (Cécile de France) and (female) Alex (Maïwenn) are traveling to Alex's parents' secluded farmhouse in the French countryside. Marie is a close-cropped, proto-butch girl, while Alex sports lovely longer brunette locks and is seemingly more
traditionally feminine. The two arrive at the farmhouse while a quick cutaway (again, no pun intended) reveals a crazed murderer performing a lewd sex act on himself with the decapitated head of a victim. Cozy, eh?
Things get horribly rough and violent almost as soon as the girls have settled down for the night. The unnamed murderer arrives at the farmhouse and begins to dispatch the family, as Marie struggles to escape his wrath, hopefully with the only other
person to survive, a bound and already tortured Alex. That sets up a fairly traditional, but inarguably suspenseful, cat and mouse game as Marie scuttles around the house evading the killer. Unfortunately, she keeps ending up in rooms where the madman is
going about his nasty business, thereby witnessing one gruesome killing after another, often getting sprayed with the detritus.
Except—everything you think you're seeing you may not be. I certainly don't want to post any spoilers for anyone who has an interest in this film and doesn't know the "twist" which comes about two-thirds of the way through, so I will be circumspect in my
commentary here, but just for safety's sake, if you're quick on the uptake and read between the lines well, it may be best to skip the rest of this review. In any case, those of you who have had some literature classes probably remember the technique of
the omniscient narrator, a literary device that allows the reader to enter various characters' minds at will. Aja here plays with that device in deliberate ways, ostensibly crafting his scenario as a literal horror show seen from Marie's eyes, albeit with
several important segues into other points of view at various times. The twist that is revealed is surprising, to say the least, but for anyone who is prone to think for even a moment about what has gone on before (and indeed what follows the twist),
there are gaping holes of logic the size of Grand Canyon which must be surmounted for anything to make even a semblance of sense.
M. Night Shyamalan has come in for a lot of critical brickbats for the illogical and often patently absurd "twists" which have been his filmic stock in trade since The Sixth Sense. And yet if one takes The Sixth Sense as an isolated example
of a well executed twist, careful analysis shows how superbly Shyamalan orchestrated the film so as to hold up to 20-20 hindsight scrutiny after the "truth" was revealed. Bringing that same scrutiny to High Tension reveals nothing other than a host
of logical problems, the bulk of which I can't detail lest I spill the beans and/or the guts.
And yet despite the film's logical inadequacies, which may indeed sink it for viewers who insist that things make sense, High Tension is an often unbearably bleak and downright scary film. Watching a poor innocent (and frankly seemingly sweet)
family get hideously murdered is bad enough, but as we watch the carnage through the eyes of Marie, we're put in an obscenely voyeuristic place where we, too, are victim and victimized, a frightened animal caught in a madman's trap.
Aja knows how to film horror, that can't be denied, though he too often settles for mere gore (in the classic, humorless sense) at the expense of logic and true character-based fear. In fact, Marie is nothing more than a cipher here, which also works to
the detriment of the film. We have no sense of her as a character, really, making the "surprise" all the more head-scratching, if no less alarming once it's revealed. For those who just like being scared, High Tension will certainly provide those
goods, and then some. For those who want a little thought behind the fright show, High Tension may seem more than a little slack.
High Tension is scary, make no bones (or blood and guts) about it. But does it ultimately make any sense? The best horror films with a twist stand up to repeated viewings and viewer post-viewing examinations. My hunch is High Tension will be
a big yawn after a first viewing, and it certainly does not withstand even a cursory logical review. Still, if you're just out for a scare, no matter how literally mindless, you'll get that, and more, with this film, which may warrant an evening's rental
around Hallowe'en.
[CSW] -1.7- I couldn't have said it better than this reviewer:
From a visual standpoint it's incredible. The director definitely knows how to make a horror atmosphere. He took an average story and made it something worth watching, at least until you hit the plot twist. I don't know who was
responsible for that, but it's completely insulting to the audience's intelligence. The more I thought about the more impossible it became. It just couldn't have happened that way. It must have been thrown in as an afterthought; it just wasn't written as
if that twist was part of the original draft of the script. I cannot fathom what kind of ridiculous ending this might have had to make this ending seem like an improvement. I won't give it away, but you've seen it done better before. You've seen it done
in a way that can actually hold up to scrutiny. Parts of it were dubbed into English while others were subtitled, and I don't get that at all.
I agree completely!
[V4.0-A5.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.
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