The World of Myth Magazine

Like all genres we absorb with our thought-sponges, it can be difficult to hold movies, shows, or pieces of literature accountable when they're products of their time. Horror has evolved in so many spectacular ways, transitioning from the macabre, subtle, black and white and silent horror into unfathomable monsters with fishing line, to grotesque body horror with masterful SFX techniques that are unmatched even today, to the subliminal quiet terrors, to gratuitous sex and gore, to everyday folks wreaking terror upon quiet towns, to gimmicky call-backs with uncharacteristically attractive adults playing teenagers alongside socialites who starred in reality TV, to warped psychological deep-dives, and countless demonic possession tropes. Everything moves and shifts and grows and changes. Tackling the nostalgia of 70's and 80's exploitation horror that captivates horror fans then and now, while striving to capture the dark twists and turns of classic noir and modernized ideas to shock an audience is hardly an easy feat. We see the vagueness in horror often because that idea in and of itself is terrifying. To not have all the information is seeded into anxieties of life. In reality, when something awful happens, a lot of reasonable people try to try to make it make sense. "Why would someone do that?" and often, we scapegoat to the easiest solution, "I guess it just happens." And a lot of storytellers profit off that idea. When you think of it like that, it's not hard to write or present something that feels or appears scary. Giving a vague awareness to the complexities of a story can lend itself a lot to doing the heavy lifting.

Deciding to revisit High Tension was daunting. It was a movie I loved when I first saw it years ago. A horror movie starring two women that didn't feel male-gazey or sleazy and knowing just how much work the leading actor put into her role physically, paired with the genuine feelings of awe I felt the first time I saw it, I was almost scared that it wouldn't hold up in as I remembered it.

High Tension stars Cecile de France as Marie, our main player, and Maiwenn le Besco (the iconic opera singer from The Fifth Element) as Alexia, two friends who seek out a quiet and peaceful environment outside of school to study. They head to Alexia's family's farm in the South of France, where Alexia's mother, father, little brother, and dog, Hendrix, live.

When the film begins, Marie awakens in the backseat of the car on the highway, admitting to having had an unpleasant dream of being chased by herself. Alexia quips that Marie ought to have normal dreams, and Marie seems to admit she will eventually share an image of Harley Quinn on her Facebook page with the quote, "Normal is just a setting on the washing machine" printed across and shared by 1.2 million older millennials right next to another picture of Hot Topic from the late 90's versus Hot Topic today. Anyway, we cut to a shot of a grizzled older dude in an ancient rust-bucket of a truck in the middle of a cornfield, receiving? No, giving? He is…he is coordinating the action of having oral sex performed on him with the decapitated head of a woman who looks eerily similar to Alexia. We cut back to the girls arriving at the house, up a path typically used by tractors, because it's…a cornfield.

Marie is introduced to Alexia's family, and everyone just goes their own separate ways, including Alexia. Marie goes outside for a cigarette and eventually returns to the guest room at the top floor of the house. It's also made abundantly clear that Alexia's family has only lived in the house for six months. It's mentioned a few times but, as far as I can tell, holds zero merit or importance.

After a complimentary and I guess necessary masturbation scene, Marie is interrupted by knocking on the front door downstairs. She gets up and looks out all the windows as Alexia's father rouses and answers the door.

The guest at the door whacks Alexia's dad over the head and lets himself in. Meanwhile, Marie is watching, still upstairs, and puzzles over what to do. Killer-man starts his spree with a tantalizingly slow, cruel murder, forcing Alexia's father's head between bannisters on the stairs, then proceeding to decapitate him with some mighty heavy furniture. He then continues his spree by seeking out the rest of the home dwellers, eventually leading him to the top floor and into Marie's guest room. But Marie is smart, putting to bed to trope of victims in films making repeatedly stupid mistakes, and rather than run (because again, she is on the top floor with no escape), she makes it look like there's no one in the room. She throws her belongings into a bag, makes the bed, even goes so far as to dry the sink of any residual wetness. Killer-man hunts her down in the room and finds nothing. Except, Marie didn't check the damned faucet! What an IDIOT! Killer-man dabs his nasty finger against the faucet and sees…water? Because it couldn't possibly be a leaky faucet. Anway, he disappears momentarily, long enough for Marie to hurry to the master bedroom to find a working telephone. This is the first instance of Marie witnessing a murder within the house. When Alexia's mother drags herself into the room to find the phone as well, Killer-man follows suit. Marie, hidden in the closet and watching through the slats, comes face-to-face with the killer slicing the mother's throat. Dude disappears again, leaving Marie to check the phone line, which is of course not working. She stealths her way through the house, seeing Alexia's young brother traipsing panicked until he rushes outside. It's then Marie finds Alexia bound and gagged in her own bedroom and also hears the gunshot ricochet in the cornfield as Killer-man finds the kid and shoots him. Alexia is in, understandable, hysterics, as Marie tries to console her.

After failing to find a working phone downstairs, because the line's been cut, the killer returns and lugs Alexia into the back of his van, where Marie follows and winds up being locked inside with her. Still trying to console Alexia and plot their escape, they wind up at a gas station. Marie is able to get out of the van and hurries inside, telling the clerk to call the police. Killer-man comes inside, kills the clerk, tries to track down Marie with only an iota of an idea she exists, but drives away before Marie can escape AND save Alexia. Finding a phone, she's able to call for help, but the operator is just so incapable of offering any assistance and is really kind of a brat. Marie's had enough and she steels the clerk's car and follows him down the highway and down a beaten path but loses him. Killer-man winds up behind her and knocks her off the road. Marie is relatively unharmed from the accident and winds up under the cover of a long-forgotten, expansive greenhouse, and comes face to face with Killer-man.

Here's where we cut to the cops arriving to the gas station they seemed to find relatively easily, much more easily than the operator made it sound, and they discover not only the dead clerk, but recorded footage of his murder, and wouldn't you know it? It was Marie! Not Killer-man! What??? M. Night Shyamalan, is that you? Tyler Durden? Anyone?

We cut back to Marie killing Killer-man, then rescuing Alexia. Alexia flees in panic after trying to kill Marie, and another chase ensues. Killer-man revives with the knife Alexia plunged into Marie stuck in him and chases after Alexia with a saw. After a beautifully bloody scene involving said saw in a small car, Alexia and Marie are face to face, Marie still consoling Alexia, begging her to love her. Alexia tells her that she does love her, then stabs her through the shoulder with a crowbar.

Marie is next seen in a mental ward, where Alexia watches from a window. "She can't see me?" she asks an attendant. Marie looks toward the window and smiles placatingly toward Alexia and waves.

End.

This is a movie that hovers right over cult classic but seems to have taken home in discussions of controversy all over the internet. Not because of the violence and gore, not even because both a dog and child were brutally killed, but because no one can seem to agree whether it was good or not.

So let's start with the bad. The narrative, while clean-cut until the last twenty-minutes, is nothing short of a classic slasher flick, contorts itself into something it felt like it was never meant to be. There are hints and clues, of course, but nothing concrete in suspecting Marie is the actual killer. What loses me is the introductory scene with the killer. It feels so disconnected from the twist that I can't help but be hung-up on it. How is it Marie? Its placement feels so random that it seems like it was just an accident to have been put it there. Had it been set before or during the scene in which Marie is pleasuring herself, it would lend so much more to the credibility of the disconnected connection between Marie and the killer. On that same note, the narrative can't seem to come to terms with whether it's sexualization or romance that Marie craves from her victims. While the head Killer-man was going to town on looked very much like Alexia, the abrupt discarding of it suggests the psychology is less about love and more about sexual power. I guess we could argue that's the split in Marie's mind: she wants to protect and love Alexia, but there's a part of her that wants to dominate and doom her. I don't know.

On the better aspect of the twist, we can also assume we are completely engulfed in Marie's narrative, which is why everything is so completely disjointed. She has fantasized herself into merely hearing or seeing the brutal actions to the point where she has completely victimized herself. But it still feels almost gimmicky and not as well planned out as we all thought it was almost 20 years ago upon first seeing it. For the audience, the clues are only graspable in the tiniest ways possible. A doll with a crack on its face is one of them.

The scene in which Marie is trying to calm Alexia while they listen to her little brother being murdered in the cornfield, while also hard to grasp in terms of the physical regard to "where is Marie actually?", is also chilling if we forget about it for a second. Imagine being Alexia, knowing the person you trusted to bring to your home, is killing your family, and is suddenly trying to quell your fears? The acting done by Maiwenn is magnificent in this scene alone.

So even if we forgive the plot-holes, even if we keep telling ourselves Marie's introspection is entirely a concoction of her own making (that she never went to console Alexia, that while she was killing her little brother, she was only imagining herself with Alexia as a way to romanticize the act of protecting her rather than being her tormenter), we really start to reach.

When Killer-man chases Marie off the road in the car she'd stolen, it again proves just how wild this fantasy is that doesn't make sense in reality. We could assume that'd she'd been driving the van, conceptualizing and rationalizing that there were indeed two cars on the road, Marie in one and Killer-man in the other, and actually crashed the van instead of the fictionalized muscle car, the next time we see the van, it's relatively unscathed. So, she…imagined the car wreck. Okay. I guess.

I wanted to thoroughly love this movie as much as I had when I first watched it, but it just never felt right with the twist. That's not to say there aren't parts of the film that aren't masterful in their delivery. The tension is real. Cecile de France is a freakin' phenom as an antagonist and protagonist, making you believe she is in the peril she believes she is. Every breath she takes doesn't feel overacted or strained, but really, painfully true to the terror. Add the blend of the score, always slow and methodical and completely unlike so many other horror films, you are, easily, on the edge of your seat with bated breath.

The gore, as well, is mindfully beautiful. Compared to the films that came shortly before and after it, the effects are plentiful without feeling gimmicky and over-the-top. There is plenty of blood, but there's still enough mystery to the actual brutality you aren't smacked over the head (heh) with it and having nothing left to imagine for yourself.

So there are absolutely magnificent moments that work in this film's favor to make it a unique, intense, and beautifully horrific journey. Until the end. Because with films and stories like this, where it leaves so much up to the audience to guess, not even piece together, but really grasp at straws to make it work, it feels exhaustive and tiresome. I love working out puzzles and connections, and I will watch and rewatch until something makes sense. But you can't make sense of something the story isn't offering, and that's information. We can assume and surmise and theorize and read and watch all the videos and articles we want, but at the end of the day, when we leave it up to the audience to figure it out, it feels like a mild cop-out or gimmick. Viewers will get what they want out of the story, and they can take away informational bits and apply them to how they understood the story. That's art at its finest, but unless you know what you're doing, it comes across as messy and reflects poorly on the writers, which I know is not what they want to be remembered for and not what they intended.

That all being said, it's not a horrible movie, it just doesn't do itself a ton of favors by trying to nibble into psychological twisty horror when it could have been an absolutely memorable and perfect slasher film. So, on one hand, it's great, but on the other…

Overall, I'd give it a 2 out 5 stars as of 2021's standards after it's initial release eighteen years ago. That's not to say that upon its release, it wasn't brilliant, we've just grown and learned more since. But if you're in it for the gore and great kills of nostalgic horror, it's definitely a great film. Did it hold up for me? Not really. But I didn't not enjoy it again.

High Tension can be bought or rented on countless streaming services, but as I've noticed happens with all my reviews, will probably be available to stream for free somewhere in the next few weeks somewhere.