I Just Saw

Perhaps all you need from a slasher film is a lot of gory killings and cat-and-mouse scenes. If so, Alexandre Aja‘a High Tension is for you. As for me, this is a film that forced upon my consciousness a realisation: whatever mood I’m in, I do at least need a story that makes a basic sort of sense and creates some reason for its existence if I’m going to engage with it. Most of the time. Don’t hold me to it.

The plot of High Tension (which is rather an arrogant title, don’t you think, like a comedy calling itself Lotsa Laffs) plays like Dean Koontz’s 1995 novel Intensity but with the, well, plot stripped out. (Koontz said that he thought about suing but decided against it because he didn’t want the association with such a stupid, puerile film.)

Marie (Cécile de France) is travelling with her university friend Alexia (Maïwenn) to the latter’s family home in the French countryside. While they’re there a killer shows up and kills Alexia’s family before kidnapping her in his truck. Marie to the rescue, cue cat-and-mouse.

Certain sequences are well-shot and reference various horror classics, such as when Marie hides in a closet and witnesses the murder of Alexia’s mother, a clear take on Halloween (1978) and maybe Blue Velvet (1986). Elsewhere, a scene of voyeurism from a hammock followed by masturbation seems to recall Emmanuelle (1974), the soft-core French classic. (Or else it’s just cheap lesploitation.)

None of these sequences come together to evoke a compelling narrative, however. They all just sort of rattle on, undercut as to that “high tension” we were promised by the sheer inanity of the characters’ behaviour. Hilariously, at one point our heroine hangs up on a 911 despatch operator because she’s struggling to state her location. People have died, including a child and an innocent bystander who might not have been very bright (they wasted an opportunity to hold an obvious killer at gunpoint) but still tried to save your life. Do you think you might owe it to them to just describe where you are until something clicks with the operator?

And then there’s the twist… hoo boy, the twist. Without it, High Tension might have at least been a memorably nasty slasher with a semi-interesting theme about rural isolation. With it, it’s potentially the stupidest slasher film I’ve seen, at least at this level of technical artistry. The ONLY way to justify it is if you brought in the supernatural. Or, I don’t know, wrote in a scene or even just a shot explaining that more than one person was at work here.

I won’t “spoil” what happens, but if and when you see it, ask yourself these questions:

1. Who was the person “using” the head, and if it’s the person revealed in the twist (which according to linear narrative would be physically impossible, but never mind), how exactly were they using it? (Actually, maybe don’t think about that one…)
2. Who was under the mattress, hiding in the closet, and at various places in or around the farmhouse while characters were being offed?
3. What exactly DID the innocent bystander see just before they died?
4. This is the big one: who was driving the truck while everyone else was in the back?

I guess a couple of these questions could be explained by some convoluted psychological abnormality. Giallo (Italian horror) films of the ‘70s thrived on that stuff. But these explanations would be thin at best and still wouldn’t cover the majority, especially the fourth.

Since Aja isn’t stupid – he can craft and stage a scene with clear intelligence – I can only assume that High Tension is nothing more than a windup toy and, looking at his story in retrospect, Aja couldn’t be bothered to make it make sense. In the absence of an actual plot, what you’re left with is the gore, which is pleasingly grotesque. Even so, there are films that’ll give you that while ALSO making sense.

Rating: 1.5/4