Euro Horror Spree
Alexandre Aja Ratchets Up Suspense
By Cole Smithey
Gory European gothic horror doesn’t come any weirder than it does when a couple of lesbian college girlfriends retreat to a weekend at the secluded farmhouse of one of their parents to study for their final exams.
A local deranged psycho-killer pays a nocturnal visit to the house and imposes a bloody terror spree that has Marie (Cecile De France) chasing the madman to rescue her friend Alex (Maiwenn), who sits as a shackled hostage in the back of his van.
A mix of English-language dubbing and French subtitles adds to the charm of director Alexandre Aja’s homage to slasher films of the ’70s, namely “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
From its original title of “Switchblade Romance,” “High Tension” takes on a more feral aspect like that of James Wan’s “Saw.” But 24-year-old French director Alexandre Aja (“Furia”) is a far more adept filmmaker than Wan.
From its disorienting opening scenes to its “Fight Club”-styled plot-twist ending “High Tension” rattles off of the understated lesbian relationship between Marie and Alex to anchor the depraved madness onscreen to a character-driven story buried underneath.
The movie starts off with a nightmare that the muscular short-haired Marie is having while riding in the backseat of Alex’s car on their way through the empty French countryside to Alex’s parent’s house. In the imagined ordeal, Marie is running cut, bruised and sullied from an unseen menace through a dense forest. When she wakes, Marie tells Alex how she experienced the nightmare from the perspective of both the attacker and the victim.
The girls briefly bitch about their study plans for the weekend, and a subtext of unresolved sexual feelings permeates as the scene closes with the friends singing along with the radio to a Euro pop song. The sexual tension between the women is escalated when Alex inexplicably stops the car at night near a giant cornfield and temporarily abandons Marie in a cruel but playful prank.
After a brief introduction to a greasy middle-aged necrophile (Philippe Nahon) who spends a lot of time in his traveling torture chamber of a van, the movie quickly takes off to loftier altitudes of horror and suspense. Alex introduces Marie to her mom, dad and baby brother before heading off to bed, but Marie hardly seems at home in the cozy surroundings. A knock at the door later and Alex’s dad is having his head sheared off with a piece of furniture by the local psycho-killer as he dispatches the family but not the girls.
Marie’s bold desperation to rescue her friend, from the claws of the demented killer, puts fire on the narrative because she has to constantly deposit herself in the victim’s shoes of proximity to the madman. But it also tauntingly associates Marie with the maniac because she repeatedly attends Alex’s bondage to reassure her.
There’s a lightly burnished look to “High Tension” that’s supported by a perfectly eerie musical score by François-Eudes Chanfrault. The movie was filmed in Romania, and the merited creepiness of the place permeates every frame. “High Tension” is a formula horror picture that culminates with an oblique plot twist that’s oddly satisfying for its dead-end brilliance. I
n short, the arcane ending works because it doesn’t make any logical sense. The purpose of the film’s nudity, gore and violence is to emphasize a madness of warped passion in a way that sends out tentacles of subtext and subjective super-personal experience.
It’s surprising that there aren’t more hard-crafted Euro horror movies to bait American audiences and part of the film’s success is due to our unfamiliarity with the actors. Cecile De France is a revelation. Her powerhouse performance lives up to the title of the movie in every way. “High Tension” is one wild ride.
Rated R. 85 mins.
