High Tension

Year: 2003

Grade: C+

Country: France

Director: Aja

Review

spoilers…french horror flick that isn’t scary, but does have some thoughtful elements to it. it explores ideas of gender – the lead is an androgynous woman on the run from a murderous man, but it turns out, in the surprise ending, that she was in fact the murderer the whole time.

a man breaks into a house and kidnaps the protagonist’s female friend after killing the friend’s entire family in brutal fashion. the protagonist sneaks into the back of the truck in an attempt to save her friend. in reality, though, she is in front driving the truck. in this sense it resembles films like hide and seek or secret window – films where the protagonist is the victim of their own darker side. this film masks it a bit more because the murderer is represented by an actual person, rather than something we can’t see. in secret window and hide and seek the perpetrator is unseen, in this film, though, we see the murderer in a male form. the implication is that the male side of the character is murderous and he female side is caring and loving. the finale sees the protagonist’s male side chasing her female side through the forest. eventually the female side kills the male side and the female side frees her friend. the friend then kills her because she is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of her family. the give away comes early in the film when it actually shows the end sequence in a dream. the protagonist wakes up and tells her friend that she had another dream where she was chasing herself. surprisingly, this doesn’t ruin the ending of the film. and, even if it does, it doesn’t ruin the film because, even though it’s not that scary, it’s still interesting on a symbolic level. unfortunately the title of the film isn’t that accurate – it’s not that tense of a film and the chase wears on a little by the end. some of the scenes are pretty brutal, which is good, but the tension isn’t sustained throughout.