Great Until the End
Summary
High Tension brings the gore and features a compelling performance by lead Cécile de France, but a twist at the end makes it less than it should have been.
Plot: Marie (Cécile de France) follows a killer (Philippe Nahon) after he breaks into her friend Alex’s (Maïwenn) place, kills Alex’s family, and kidnaps Alex.
Review: I remember when High Tension came out. That image of a barbed wire bat, that poster, it just left an indelible picture in my mind. Even after hearing about Negan’s bat on The Walking Dead, I couldn’t help but think of that poster. Despite that image dogging me for like, twenty years, I finally watched the movie. I knew it was going to promise gore by the bucket, but was there anything else to it?
Well, the plot closely follows Dean Koontz’s 1995 novel Intensity. Like, not exactly, but a lot of what transpires in the book happens in the movie. It’s so similar that the director admitted to reading the book before making the movie. Mr. Koontz decided not to press charges because he thought the movie was garbage and didn’t want his name associated with it, even in a court case. Which, if you know Mr. Koontz’s work, his wry response to the question is typical Koontz. The movie was also cut for an R-rating in the States, but luckily, the version I saw was “Unrated”, so all the naughty bits were in it.
But enough about my mental earworms for posters and behind-the-scenes controversy with the film. Is the movie actually good? For the most part, it’s a fun ride. It starts slow, and as soon as the home invasion (is one person breaking into a home an invasion?) begins, the movie goes pedal to the metal. The blood flies, and though the body count is low, the, ummm…tension…is quite high throughout. The lead character almost gets caught by the killer about a bazillion times as the movie plays out, and you’re always prepared for him to get wise about her presence in the movie. So, for pacing, it’s a ninety-minute roller coaster.
There aren’t a lot of characters in the movie – it’s a low-budget affair, and being so, locations and characters are at a premium. I will say that the lead, Cécile de France, is perfect as the scrappy, resourceful Marie. I was with her pretty much the entire movie, rooting for her. Even though she’s overmatched in most of the movie, her spunky attitude carries her through. Philippe Nahon is an absolute terror as the killer. The guy is so odious, so hateful, you can’t wait for him to get his just desserts. Everyone else is fine in the movie, but those two steal the show.
Now, if this were a straight movie without any twist, it would have been an above-average genre movie with enough gore and thrilling moments to make the horror crowd happy. However, whether to disavow itself from Intensity or for purposes of not making a “typical slasher” film (as if it were already “typical”), the movie introduced a twist at the end. At first, it’s neat. However, I immediately thought it was unnecessary. I don’t know why movie directors can’t accept their lane and understand that a genre film is a genre film; it doesn’t have to be something it’s not. Nope, the movie got fancy and when it did, it created a gaping logic hole that you can’t ignore. That is a shame because they really had something here, but nope, nope, nope, it had to go and try something shocking at the end. And in doing so, it called the story’s entire plausibility into question. Not that a slasher film called “High Tension” was expected to usurp The Godfather as the best-reviewed movie of all time. But still…why go there?
The gore is great, the lead is great, the suspense is great, the ending is not. And you could argue that a craptacular ending should not derail a movie. But when an ending is so bad that it negatively impacts the rest of the movie, you can’t ignore it. So, High Tension is a solid slasher film…but it could have been much, much more.