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Rating: I approached this film overcoming a certain skepticism, mainly due to the banality of a title that reeks of "Thriller Night on Channel 5" from a mile away, and the conventionality of a plot (that of two students who retreat to a remote country house to study, only to fall victim to a homicidal maniac), which, more than being cliché, now seems to have become "mandatory" for a horror movie. What convinced me, in the end, apart from an impressive series of enthusiastic reviews that appeared everywhere when this film was released in our country (incidentally with the classic couple of years delay compared to its home release), was especially the presence, as director and screenwriter, of the young and talented Parisian Alexandre Aja (here working on his third feature film), who just last year had favorably impressed me with the good remake of "The Hills Have Eyes" ('06).
After viewing it, I feel "High Tension" is a good slasher. In fact, for at least three-quarters of its duration, it is an excellent slasher: tense, cynical, brutal, almost voyeuristic in its lingering on blood, mutilations, violence, elevated by truly excellent cinematography (great play of light and shadow in the sequences at the beginning of the film, as well as in those near the end, set in the greenhouse) and, above all, by an almost perfect choice of cinematic timing. Aja, in fact, proves to be particularly adept at alternating moments of exasperating murderous slowness with others of frantic frenzy, moving gracefully between original shots, though never excessively "contrived," and long, refined single takes.
The director shows, above all, an uncommon ability to make familiar situations and solutions interesting, already seen and used in who knows how many other films. Whether it's the "innocent citationism" of the white wardrobe of Carpenterian memory in which the protagonist Marie hides or the more than overused public bathroom scene (where the killer opens the stalls one by one, searching for the one where the protagonist is hiding), whether it's the umpteenth cornfield surrounding yet another country house, the umpteenth chainsaw, or the umpteenth chase in the woods, the film (I repeat: for at least three-quarters of its duration) despite its marked derivativeness, succeeds in what was presumably its primary intent: stimulating the production of adrenaline.
Aja, moreover, departing from that Hooperian school that tends to "suggest" horror more than flaunt it, makes us fully participate in the massacre staged by the killer of the moment, lingering in a sort of barely concealed enjoyment for the strong and particularly bloody scenes, so much so that some sequences, also excellently shot, can even turn out to be too "self-indulgent" (two above all: the first decapitation and the dismemberment with a circular saw... the latter particularly... um... "tasty"...).
If you add to this a female protagonist with androgynous features, yet with a pronounced sensuality, furthermore (apparently) endowed with a bit of brain (rare commodity, speaking of horror), an extremely effective soundtrack in its minimalism and dialogues whittled down to the bone (in my opinion, always preferable to the demented-heroic drivel often encountered in this type of films), you can get an idea of how the viewer might feel disappointed by the narrative twist that is tossed to them when the film is already nearing its end. Perhaps constrained by a script that left very little room for maneuver, perhaps compelled by the necessity to pull themselves out of the muddy waters of a story that, physiologically, is destined to develop within limited space-time-narrative coordinates, Aja, with just under half an hour to go before the end of the film, decides to turn the tables, dismissing the viewer with yet another "ending that entirely reinterprets the film".
Unfortunately, however, the "coup de théâtre" turns out to be poorly crafted and, indeed, a half-failure. Not only due to the predictability and lack of originality (again) of the adopted solution but especially for its almost total "narrative ineffectiveness," for its inability to make sense of so many, too many elements of the story (where does the killer's van come from? How do you explain the bloodstains that soil it? And the collection of victims' photos? Even some scenes - especially the necrophilia one - lose all reason to exist): truly too abrupt an awakening for the viewer who, until that point, had willingly gone along with the game, had willingly engaged in a narrative fiction certainly not revolutionary, but extremely effective.
Thus, "Haute Tension" confirms itself as a very good product from a purely technical point of view, but truly unoriginal and flawed from a narrative point of view, irreparably compromised by an ending that has the strong bad taste of a clumsy deception, perpetrated at the expense of the viewer.
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