HIGH TENSION

Marie is invited to spend the week in her friend Alex's country cottage to study for her university exams. The cottage is home to Alex's family and surrounded by an endless field of corn. A bloodthirsty killer roams the region and, during the night, enters the house and brutally massacres Alex's parents and little brother, also kidnapping Alex without realizing that Marie was hiding inside the house. The girl, determined to free her friend, will rush into a crazy chase where the roles of victim and executioner will increasingly blur. The title of this strong thriller says it all: "High Tension". Indeed, the film is built like a clockwork mechanism that endlessly accumulates the tension of the viewer to the point of exasperation, thanks to very effective extremely long sequences in which the characters play cat and mouse: they hide, search for each other, find each other, and then die.. naturally in the most gruesome and brutal ways. Indeed, the level of violence and cruelty in this film is particularly high, just like the tension of the title! The long sequence of the massacre at the cottage (which strongly reminds of the 1971 film "Terror Blind" by Richard Fleischer) abundantly turns into splatter, with severed heads, amputated limbs, and slit throats; but it is not a spectacular and cartoon-like splatter as many recent productions have accustomed us to, but rather a sick and almost disturbing violence, which hits directly in the stomach. All this was exactly what the director aimed for, as he himself stated "High Tension" is "a 100% genre film, which contains no message but has only one goal: to scare". Perhaps it will not be fear that the film in question will generate in the viewer, but it is undoubtedly engaging, tense, and sickening. Despite the good premises "High Tension" is not exempt from defects; the most macroscopic and rather serious one is undoubtedly the turn that the story takes in the ending to create an unexpected twist, which however only ends up showing a glaring plot hole that clashes with the logic of the film. An ending that seems glued here just to surprise the viewer but which turns out to be cumbersome and almost not foreseen during the subject's drafting. Overlooking this, the film remains a solid splatter-thriller directed and edited with a sense of rhythm; with a good cast including the androgynous protagonist Cécile de France (already seen in the comedy "The Spanish Apartment") and Maiwenn Le Besco (appeared in small roles in "Léon" and "The Fifth Element"); excellent makeup special effects by our Giannetto de Rossi and a varied and spot-on soundtrack (in which "Sarà perché ti amo" by Ricchi e Poveri appears curiously). In short, a French film that perfectly imitates the American style, in its strengths and weaknesses, and that offers the viewer what it promises: tension and gratuitous violence. Not recommended for the most impressionable.