A grubby, bloodstained horror flick loaded to the brim in gratuitous violence, High Tension is baseless, misanthropic, and yet perversely thrilling, says TIM WONG.


BLAME Gasper Noé. Ever since the notorious Euro-provocateur nullified everything you thought you knew about sex and violence in film with 2002's Irréversible, the hardcore of French Cinema hasn't quite been the same. Of course, we know that Noé isn't the first, and far from the only one impregnating extreme, ultra-didactic moments of brutality and sadism into a national cinema founded on the renegade disobedience of the Godard/Truffant nouvelle vague. Today's band à part may not register on the same anarchic po-mo fault line of dissidence, but their filmmaking at the least manages to feign a similar sense of ballsy rebellion, with an even greater propensity to offend.

Alexandre Aja's attempted entry into the film-school-of-hard-knocks doesn't nearly belong next to a Catherine Breillat or Bruno Dumont number, but in the sex and violence stakes, it's the goriest, most malevolent horror genre piece in years. Intentional or not, Aja doesn't seem to give a damn – High Tension is gratuitous, and certainly content-less, ploughing ahead by way of genre law through a crimson-red cornfield of dismembered limbs and switchblade romanticism. It's degenerative, misogynistic and alarmingly Americanised – and yet exactly the sort of "Incredible Cinema" to excite the liberally-depraved crowds of a former cultist film festival hell bent on unearthing sinful dwarfs, sex-change operations and other ghastly modes of exploitation.

Forged from the same inbred, hick country anxiety that began in Deliverance, and then later manifested in Jeepers Creepers, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other non-urban campfire myths, High Tension feels generic as hell, and yet effectively plugs into the circuit wiring of the horror mainframe – the same psychological motherboard that powered the giallo of Dario Argento, or the mask-'n-sharp-object terrorism of Wes Craven. In Aja's world, collegiate galpals Alex and Marie escape to a French countryside villa for some much-needed swot. It's I Spit on Your Grace with lesbians, apparently, and anyone familiar with that film knows it's only a matter of time before the locals come out to play; the scent of single women retreating to the wilderness for some undisturbed book time enough to attract even the most backwards of village idiots.

Only Philippe Nahon is no dunce. You know him as the belligerent butcher in I Stand Alone, or the (same) guy jailed in Irréversible for doing the unmentionables to his daughter. Nahon obviously doesn't mind this form of putrid scum-of-the-earth pigeonholing, because here he is, again, as a psychopath sporting bloodstained overalls and a fistful of razorblades in a late night house call for anything but a cup of sugar. Never mind who's knocking at the door in the dead of the night – as horror logic dictates, it makes better sense just to open it and have a homicidal maniac clobber you over the head before decapitating it with side of some heavy antique cabinetry. The remainder of the villa's occupants are doomed, for sure, only their demise is coiled like a slow-churning autopsy as they're flushed out and dissected room-by-room over 20 excruciating minutes – including a child, which now according to Funny Games, is fair game like the rest of us adults.

Meanwhile, the green-lacquered Panic Room aesthetic is traded for a Breakdown middle-of-nowhere phobia once our killer hits the road. With Alex bound and gagged in the trunk – no doubt in store for the same treatment a severed head received earlier in the piece – it's left up to the film's "heroine" Marie to Kill Phil and save the girl via a barbed wire mallet, a chainsaw and other bludgeoning devices. She's a sexually repressed bunch of feminist angst whose girl empowerment stems from the same gender payback found in all those rape-revenge movies; if only the very cause and effect of her crusade wasn't undone by what can only be described as the M. Night Shyamalan factor. This revelation – if you want to call it that – hits home like an anvil from the sky, only proving to heighten the misogyny at hand, all while grinding the film down to an arbitrary, pie-in-the-face halt.

A perennial scapegoat of whodunits if ever there was one, the "twist" is made plausible (or so says Aja) by the perceived, and certainly mediated archetypes of evil – which perhaps goes some way to explaining the Nahon typecast, the derivative locale of dimly lit gas stations and murky forests, or the proviso of hiding under the bed. It works somewhat begrudgingly as a representation of horror movies, if only to straddle that thin red line between commentary and parody; the appropriateness of the Tension in Haute perhaps the film's one reprieve from being rebranded Scary Movie IV for all its mouthfuls of genre backwash. In interviews, Aja seems earnest in his appraisal of the film's intellectual property – maybe trying to live up to his Frenchness – but it all fails to eventuate on screen, the remnants of which are fortunately diverted by a large Ferris wheel of tightly spun suspense. The film is simpler than he'd like us to believe, Thank God, spread generously across a gurney of CSI leftovers with an unpretentious perversion of thrills that has it landing somewhere in the middle of a tribute movie and an old fashioned bloodbath. As baseless and misanthropic as these things are, it's perfectly alright to feel guilt with pleasure at the expense of dead people here; unlike Aja's French contemporaries, this is one violent film without the baggage.