Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 10, 2005, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Director/co-scripter Alexandre Aja intended High Tension to be a tribute to survival/splatter fare of the ’70s and early ’80s, and the trimming it has undergone for U.S. release has made it a little more of one than he intended. In one gruesome setpiece, a character’s throat is slashed, and in the original French release, we saw the wound open up, and there was the slightest pause before blood came gushing out—just like in the unexpurgated first murder from the original Friday the 13th. But MPAA dictates have resulted in a cutaway before the red stuff really starts to flow—just like in the R version of Friday.
Small edits like this may have lightened up the gore content of High Tension, but the good news is that they don’t dilute the overall power of Aja’s film. And Lions Gate’s application of English to broaden the movie’s American appeal has been done as deftly as could be hoped for. Now, instead of French students Marie (Cécile de France) and Alex (Maiwenn) visiting the latter’s family in the countryside, Alex is an American whose folks and young brother have moved to France, and brings her new local friend Marie along for a visit. It’s a neat way to ease a U.S. audience into accepting a dual-language scenario, and the dubbing, while not perfect, is more than acceptable. Besides, it’s not long before a hulking, barely speaking brute (Philippe Nahon) has slaughtered Alex’s family and bound, gagged and kidnapped Alex, leaving Marie the sole character on screen for much of the remaining proceedings and thus keeping spoken dialogue to a minimum.
Marie’s initial reserved nature, growing panic as horrific events unfold before her and eventual steely resolve to rescue Alex and defeat the human monster are all put across with great conviction by de France—in a far cry from her last highly visible role for U.S. audiences, the heroine of Jackie Chan’s Around the World in 80 Days. She helps carry a film that is not so much about plot (and what story there is will seem remarkably familiar to anyone who’s read Dean Koontz’s Intensity or seen the TV adaptation), but about plunging its heroine into one long nightmarish scenario. Marie witnesses brutal slayings (an identification-encouraging inversion of the usual slasher standard of depicting violence from the killer’s point of view), sees her best friend cruelly tormented, is savagely attacked herself and has to walk barefoot in a gas station bathroom (yuck).
Aja’s style is direct and unshowy, as he builds, well, high tension by realistically depicting the most horrible acts early on, letting the viewer know that anything bad that can happen probably will. He’s got a strong sense of where to put the camera for maximum impact, and fine support from co-writer/designer Grégory Levasseur, cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, composer Francois Eudes and the sound designers (who whip up a genuinely eerie audioscape) and FX creator Giannetto de Rossi, spilling more blood than he has since his Lucio Fulci days. And Aja has one heck of an imposing villain in Nahon. Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone demonstrated the actor’s ability to convey menace by speaking his disturbed mind; here, with barely any dialogue, Nahon creates a murderous force of nature through simple, brutal body language. He has stated in interviews his reluctance to take this role because he wants to get away from enacting cinematic villains, which is a real shame ’cause he’s so damn good at it.
As the film goes on, Aja finds ways to raise the stakes without spinning the proceedings into implausibility—right up until a major plot twist in the last reel that, frankly, doesn’t hold up. It makes a certain amount of psychological sense—and adds new meaning to a key scene early in the film—but in terms of the storytelling, it’s a cheat. It’s also not really necessary—the movie would have been just as, if not more, satisfying if the movie had just played out its scenario in the way it seemed to be going. In addition, the final scenes find Aja plunging into exaggerated mayhem that, after the down-to-earth grittiness of what has come before, takes the movie too far over the top. In these moments, Aja’s influences seem to be less John Carpenter and Wes Craven but rather Euro gore freaks like Olaf Ittenbach and Andreas Schnaas.
The movie recovers for a resonant epilogue, and despite its narrative hiccups, High Tension succeeds as one of so many recent homages to the ’70s horror style, the approach is starting to seem like it belongs to this decade as well. It’ll be interesting to see how Aja handles a direct re-enactment of a vintage classic in his remake of The Hills Have Eyes; for now, it’s encouraging that an imported blood-and-guts film can still avoid a direct-to-video fate and play in wide theatrical release, just like in the good old days.
