The film makes itself far too easy to dismiss and forget about, and it�s really a shame, because it has a lot going for it and could have gone down in the books as one of the all-time great splatter-punk films.
I understand that most horror films are all about repressed sexuality, and have various underlying socio-political currents, no matter how weak they might be. The problem I had with �High Tension,� however, was not that it was particularly about repression, but about sexuality of a predatory and deadly nature. I suppose you could call it a satire, perhaps, or just a dumb, thoughtless motivation that the filmmakers felt they had to throw in, but it doesn�t work, it leaves holes in the plot big enough to jump through, and frankly, it�s offensive. What�s wrong with simply having the movie be about a sadistic serial killer sweeping through the French countryside, offing his victims in increasingly cruel and gory ways?
The idea of someone indiscriminately raping, killing and torturing is far more terrifying to me than having to give the killer some kind of arbitrary motivation for doing so, and it ruins the horror. To be perfectly honest, after the initial setup and slaughter, which is dragged out to an inhuman degree (it takes up more or less the whole first half of the film; although if this had just been the entire film, it would have been a fucking masterpiece), I was very bored, and kept waiting for something else to happen.
For his part, director Alexandre Aja is more than competent, and it�s no wonder he�s been picked up to direct the remake of Wes Craven�s brilliant 1976 film, �The Hills Have Eyes,� a film that attempts to prove that in the right circumstances, even decent, urban, white, middle-class people can turn into savages, a theme he started out exploring in the unwatchable �Last House on the Left.�
Oddly enough, �High Tension� reminded me a lot of another French thriller, the 1997 Michael Haneke film, �Funny Games.� It�s a movie I absolutely deplored when I saw it, but over the years, have come to respect. It�s a study of pure evil, with no motivation given the perpetrators, and it�s horrifying. The violence so cruel and matter-of-fact, the 2 young men who take the family hostage so cute and innocent-looking, but they revel in their carnage. The movie really works, it seems, because Haneke knows the true nature of evil and doesn�t try to rationalize or explain anything away. It simply is.
So the point of all this is to say that �High Tension� gets too bogged down in its own pretension and cleverness. If the filmmakers had simply let things be, and let the film play out with tacking on their little unfunny joke (which is what it feels like), we all would have been in much worse shape when the lights finally came back up (and I mean that in the best way).
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