A spoiler-free revisionist movie review.
Did you know Philippe Nahon died during COVID? Too bad. “High Tension” from 2003 is one of the original entries in the New French Extremity movement, and its reputation therein would not be as solidified weren’t it for the committed turn by the late Mr. Nahon. It made me check his IMDB page to see if there were any other movies of his I was missing out on, only to find the ones I knew were what I expected to be his highlights: his early Gaspar Noé contributions and “Calvaire”. Hey, if I was a professional actor, I’d probably be satiated with the kind of marquee Nahon got from this and “I Stand Alone” – inevitable typecasting aside. Some people like playing the villain, and some were born to play villains. Nahon falls squarely into the second category, and his methodical killer at the heart of director Alexandre Aja’s first feature (who went on to make the “Hills Have Eyes” & “Piranha” remakes) rescues what is unfortunately a very opuscule “college girls trapped at a secluded location while being hunted for unknown reasons” genre ride.
But that really isn’t fair, is it? High Tension is one of the grandparents of “Inside”, “Martyrs”, and the aforementioned Calvaire: French movies from France with highly-nihilistic French tendencies (all three of which are awesome for what they are). The New French Extremity page lists other titles such as “Trouble Every Day” with Vincent Gallo & “Baise-Moi”, but my interest in the genre falls less on the erotic (I subjectively wouldn’t put any Catherine Breillat films on the list) and more the dark & violent. As we push-on to the 20-to-25-year anniversaries of these films, it’s easy to forget the impact they had when first released: audiences hadn’t seen anything like them on the mainstream circuit before. I mean, sex in a French movie is nothing new, surely, but the realistic on-screen portrayal of sadism was. Gone were the days of Pasolini’s Salo, when you hardly saw anything, everything was implied, and what audiences conjured in their mind’s eye was usually worse than what the film bothered to show (except the shit-eating. That was pretty bad).
Nowadays you can go on any of those “free-to-watch” streaming networks like the Roku Channel, Plex, or Tubi and find literally hundreds of mid-to-low-budget horror movies from every era, all vying for your time and operating on different levels of the “bad taste” scale. It’s the sort of thing to completely dash anyone’s dream of making any kind of movie these days if in five-years-or-less its destined to be a forgotten addendum in the Free category of my streaming box – the category in which, ironically, our subject for today now resides. Even “Mad Max: Fury Road” is on Tubi, and that was from 2015! Isn’t that considered a quote-unquote “modern day action masterpiece”? Sadly, not to today’s tweens, on whom the entire foundation of Netflix’s umpteen school-shows now rests. Did the “Resident Evil” show need as many scenes with the leading ladies in school as it did? Probably not, unless it’s Netflix writing your cheques. Life isn’t fair.
High Tension is not a “masterpiece”, although critically-speaking I can respect it for the things it tries to do that were new at the time of its release: abundant cruelty that deviously alternates between implicit & explicit (a character is killed off-screen, only for us to then get a sensationalistic close-up shot of the mangled body); two strong female leads, one of whom isn’t written like a total ignoramous; and a big bad who kills without malice, only to give an 11th-hour reason for his carnage. These days, it’s a dime-a-dozen to find a movie about a bunch of teenagers in a room hunted by some smelly intimidating dude with nefarious intentions. In fact, I found High Tension to be very similar to another French nastie from three-years-later: “They”. In They, it’s a married couple who are terrorized through the night by a handful of assailants, and with a near-dearth of the blood & guts seen in these other movies They still worked thanks to some fast-paced direction (it’s only 70-minutes-long) and maze-like production design that could put the home invaders anywhere inside the couple’s sprawling & under-renovated country estate, at any time. It’s another movie like Breillats’ that doesn’t necessarily belong on the French Extremity list (it’s pretty tame compared to something like “Frontiers”), but it’s tense & scary – even after multiple viewings.
High Tension is not scary. Sorry. Everything that happens in it (other than the “big reveal”, which – besides not standing up to hard-scrutiny – is also sociologically problematic) I’ve seen done elsewhere. We’re always going to run into this problem as generations age and the “hot young filmmakers” of today try everything they can to subvert a century’s worth of audience expectation. Not just movies from the ‘naughts, but silent film all the way forward: when we watch a movie like High Tension now, we don’t see it like audiences did when the film was new. We see it under the guise of every trope we’ve been taught before & since. I like Aja’s work after this (“Louis Drax” & “Horns” are some entirely-watchable oddities, and his “Hills Have Eyes” was probably the first time I had ever caught myself perspiring in a movie theatre), and – like I said and cannot stress enough – the acting is great, especially from Nahon. And at least two of the kills (one involving a chest-of-drawers, and the other with the buzzsaw prominently-featured in the film’s advertising) are as high-caliber as I’ve ever seen in the genre. By all means it’s an entertaining watch for those who can appreciate the production adeptness involved. But it’s been outclassed & outdone in the years since. I’m going to have to make a note for myself that I’ve written about this a few times so I don’t do it again (maybe I just like complaining).
From a contemporary perspective, it’s almost as if we must watch these movies as one would a black-&-white film to appreciate them now – from a different time & place, removed from modern space, much like Mr. Nahon’s iconic turn as the Butcher in “Carne” & I Stand Alone. Godspeed, Philippe – hopefully you get to work on some romantic comedies wherever you are now.
//jf 9.17.2022
Movie poster sourced from impawards.com. Screenshots author-obtained.
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