Starring: Cécile de France, Maïwenn Le Besco, Philippe Nahon, Frank Khalfoun Script: Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur Original Title: Haute Tension Running Time: 1:35 Country: France Year: 2004 Trailer: High Tension Official Site: High Tension
When you think about French cinema, gore films don't
exactly come to mind. However, the idea was intriguing
enough to have master of horror, Wes Craven, reserve
a seat—even though he didn't show up—at the
screening which was held at the City of Lights City of
Angels French film festival in LA. Directed by
Alexandre Aja, the son of director Alexandre Arcady,
High Tension is an intense slasher movie
about a psychopathic farmer who goes on a
rampage—one thing that will certainly reassure
French amateurs of the genre is that French
rednecks are apparently as dangerous and primitive as
their American counterparts.
High Tension is shot in gritty
desaturated colors. From beginning to end,
the director does a solid job of building and
sustaining the tension, even though he doesn't offer
anything original enough to reinvent the genre. The
most interesting part of his work, however, can be found
somewhere else: at the soundtrack level. In the
first third of the film, as he slowly crafts his web
of terror around the isolated house where the gruesome
slaughter of a family will take place, he uses various
sounds—metallic, industrial and natural—to
make us cringe. Aja cultivates psychological terror
with details such as the sound of a window and never
really showing the face of the killer, slowly raising
our consciousness that something is going to happen,
teasing the audience with a long setting—a
process that is clearly reminiscent of Sergio Leone's
opening in Once Upon A Time In The West.
However, as soon as the shocking act of barbarism has
taken place, the film loses this uniqueness to go for
the usual—though well directed—cat-and-mouse
game, before finally collapsing with an absurd final
twist. High Tension "unofficially" ends
with the family murder, in the first half of the film,
and Aja clearly looks like a filmmaker who knows how
to create a premise but is not able to convert it into
a full feature film. Since Paul Verhoeven and Joe
Eszterhas reintroduced the concept to the masses with
Basic Instinct, twists have become uninspired
screenwriters' favorite sleuths. They sometimes work
beautifully—Usual Suspects—or can be
playful—Identity—but here it isn't the case.
Aja's ending is cheap and plainly idiotic because the
director doesn't make the effort to build it. There
is no logic to it, and if you think about the events
that preceded it, you realize that it doesn't
make any sense at the narrative level.
High Tension is purely a work of
mise-en-scene and acting. While Cécile de France has
been noticed for her presence, more impressive is,
once again, this latest incarnation by Phillipe Nahon,
this time as a serial killer. The actor who both
fascinated and disgusted us as the butcher in I Stand
Alone & Irreversible proves he is the most menacing
presence in today's French cinema, and the real
epicenter of tension in this film.
High Tension movie review
