High Tension Blu-ray delivers great video and reference-quality audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
Marie and Alexia are classmates and best friends. Hoping to prepare for their college exams in
peace and quiet, they decide to spend a weekend in the country at Alexia's parents' secluded
farmhouse. But in the dead of night, a stranger knocks on the front door. And with the first
swing of his knife, the girls' idyllic weekend turns into an endless night of horror.
Is Alexandre Aja serious? The French director, who rose to fame, of a certain order at least, with the release of High Tension in 2003, and then went on to helm Mirrors and The Hills Have Eyes, proclaims his surprise in one of the extras on this Blu-ray that so many people found High Tension "gory and violent." Aja then goes on to link "true" goriness with comedy, averring that that kind of goriness is nowhere to be found in his film. If one takes his hypothesis as correct (pretty doubtful, frankly), then one has to agree with Aja, for High Tension is certainly one of the grimmest, most humorless horror films ever released. But as to a more commonly accepted definition of gore, let's just recount a few images from this film. In general terms, a family is slaughtered one by one in some of the most explicitly bloody and violent scenes in recent memory. Specifically, we get one victim sliced with a razor, then impaled between two banisters on a staircase and summarily decapitated by a chest of drawers. Another victim has her throat sliced open seemingly to the vertebrae, with attendant spurting blood covering every wall in the room. Our erstwhile heroine suffers the slings and arrows of several bloody incidents, leaving her largely unrecognizable underneath the carnage inflicted on her body and face. Comic? Hardly. Gory? You be the judge.
Wake up, Marie, it's time to watch people getting slaughtered!
High Tension takes the time honored trope of placing an innocent family in an isolated location, introduces an insane and seemingly random killer in their midst, and then lets the blood fly where it will. There's little motive or logic given in the screenplay by Aja and his collaborator Gregory Levasseur, but of course there never has to be in films like this. The point is to get to the mayhem, and Aja does that relatively painlessly (no pun intended). College friends (or are they more than that?) Marie (Cécile de France) and (female) Alex (Maïwenn) are traveling to Alex's parents' secluded farmhouse in the French countryside. Marie is a close-cropped, proto-butch girl, while Alex sports lovely longer brunette locks and is seemingly more traditionally feminine. The two arrive at the farmhouse while a quick cutaway (again, no pun intended) reveals a crazed murderer performing a lewd sex act on himself with the decapitated head of a victim. Cozy, eh?
Things get horribly rough and violent almost as soon as the girls have settled down for the night. The unnamed murderer arrives at the farmhouse and begins to dispatch the family, as Marie struggles to escape his wrath, hopefully with the only other person to survive, a bound and already tortured Alex. That sets up a fairly traditional, but inarguably suspenseful, cat and mouse game as Marie scuttles around the house evading the killer. Unfortunately, she keeps ending up in rooms where the madman is going about his nasty business, thereby witnessing one gruesome killing after another, often getting sprayed with the detritus.
Excepteverything you think you're seeing you may not be. I certainly don't want to post any spoilers for anyone who has an interest in this film and doesn't know the "twist" which comes about two-thirds of the way through, so I will be circumspect in my commentary here, but just for safety's sake, if you're quick on the uptake and read between the lines well, it may be best to skip the rest of this review. In any case, those of you who have had some literature classes probably remember the technique of the omniscient narrator, a literary device that allows the reader to enter various characters' minds at will. Aja here plays with that device in deliberate ways, ostensibly crafting his scenario as a literal horror show seen from Marie's eyes, albeit with several important segues into other points of view at various times. The twist that is revealed is surprising, to say the least, but for anyone who is prone to think for even a moment about what has gone on before (and indeed what follows the twist), there are gaping holes of logic the size of Grand Canyon which must be surmounted for anything to make even a semblance of sense.
M. Night Shyamalan has come in for a lot of critical brickbats for the illogical and often patently absurd "twists" which have been his filmic stock in trade since The Sixth Sense. And yet if one takes The Sixth Sense as an isolated example of a well executed twist, careful analysis shows how superbly Shyamalan orchestrated the film so as to hold up to 20-20 hindsight scrutiny after the "truth" was revealed. Bringing that same scrutiny to High Tension reveals nothing other than a host of logical problems, the bulk of which I can't detail lest I spill the beans and/or the guts.
And yet despite the film's logical inadequacies, which may indeed sink it for viewers who insist that things make sense, High Tension is an often unbearably bleak and downright scary film. Watching a poor innocent (and frankly seemingly sweet) family get hideously murdered is bad enough, but as we watch the carnage through the eyes of Marie, we're put in an obscenely voyeuristic place where we, too, are victim and victimized, a frightened animal caught in a madman's trap.
Aja knows how to film horror, that can't be denied, though he too often settles for mere gore (in the classic, humorless sense) at the expense of logic and true character-based fear. In fact, Marie is nothing more than a cipher here, which also works to the detriment of the film. We have no sense of her as a character, really, making the "surprise" all the more head-scratching, if no less alarming once it's revealed. For those who just like being scared, High Tension will certainly provide those goods, and then some. For those who want a little thought behind the fright show, High Tension may seem more than a little slack.
High Tension arrives on Blu-ray via an AVC encode, in full 1080p and a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. This is a film which glories in a yellow-green, fluorescent ethos, overly grainy with low contrast. Videophiles may take this Blu-ray to task for that, but it is obviously what Aja intended for the film to look like. The entire film has a weird, alien glow to it, almost as if it is being seen through night vision goggles. Grain is more than noticeable in most of these dark shots, it virtually overwhelms the image at times, though, again, I am quite certain this was Aja's intention. It's pointless to discuss whether colors are "lifelike" or not in a film this deliberately processed, though the most natural looking scenes, the opening segment with the girls driving, and the first few calm moments at the farmhouse before the carnage starts, look decently sharp, with good, well saturated color. The bulk of this film, though, is deliberately blanched, with a definite tilt toward the yellow-green end of the spectrum.
Let's get the "controversy" out of the way first: yes, High Tension's original lossless French DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 track is "dubtitled" rather than properly subtitled. I speak good enough French to state that there are some differences in the dubtitles from what's actually being said on the original language track, but it's nothing of such great import than anyone should lose any sleep over it. Moving on to the soundtrack proper, this is a relentlessly aggressive and very effective piece of sonic design, with overwhelming immersion at times, especially in the many claustrophobic scenes where Marie is attempting to elude the killer. Sound effects are both very well designed and placed very artfully around the soundfield. The cat and mouse game between Marie and the killer is a textbook example of very simple, but incredibly suspenseful, sound design editing, as we hear various footsteps and other ambient sounds creeping in from various directions. Dialogue and a very effectively creepy underscore are well mixed and very clear. Special attention has also been paid to dynamic range here. We get everything from the hushed, almost incomprehensible, whispers that open the film to the more bombastic, violent moments at the height of the carnage. Whatever issues you may have with High Tension as a film, you have to respect and admire this very effective DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 mix.
High Tension features several bonuses supplementing the main feature:
Commentary by Aja and Levasseur is good, though a bit hard to make out at times, revealing the two friends' long history with each other and their shared love for the horror genre;
Scene Specific Commentary with Aja and de France hits some of the bigger gore-fests of the film;
Haute Horror (SD; 23:47) is an OK EPK-fest with interviews and behind the scenes footage;
Building Tension (SD; 8:14), was for my money much more interesting than the longer featurette, spending a little (too little) time going into various elements (like editing) which up the fear quotient in the film;
Giannetto De Rossi: The Truth, the Madness and the Magic (SD; 7:42) is another too brief, but very interesting, look at the iconic makeup artist and his contributions to this film.
High Tension is scary, make no bones (or blood and guts) about it. But does it ultimately make any sense? The best horror films with a twist stand up to repeated viewings and viewer post-viewing examinations. My hunch is High Tension will be a big yawn after a first viewing, and it certainly does not withstand even a cursory logical review. Still, if you're just out for a scare, no matter how literally mindless, you'll get that, and more, with this film, which may warrant an evening's rental around Hallowe'en.
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