anyone come between us - Haute Tension (2003)
aka further adventures in the New French Extremity regions of experience
With thanks to friend of the Stack, Emma Arneil, who chose this movie off my longlist. Go listen to Emma’s podcast Beyond the Scream!
Last time we talked about the New French Extremity/Cinema du corps, we looked at a movie that may fall a bit to the wayside when discussing this… movement/subgenre/canon of films, Marina de Van’s Dans Ma Peau. This time, we’re going the complete opposite way and talking about a movie that’s arguably the one that most easily comes to mind if you were ever asked to name a New French Extremity movie.
Well, aside from Martyrs, that is.
Spoilers, comme d'habitude. Also, I feel like I should be upfront about this: the dog dies. Justice for Hendrix, you did not deserve any of this, honestly. Also also brief mention of necrophilia. Because… this film.
Haute Tension (2003)
Also known as: High Tension, Switchblade Romance
Directed by: Alexandre Aja
Starring: Cécile de France, Maïwenn Le Besco, Philippe Nahon, Andrei Finti, Oana Pellea, Franck Khalfoun, Marco Claudiu Pascu
Running time: 95 minutes
Original release date: 18 June 2003
the plot, in brief
Friends Marie (de France) and Alexia (Le Besco) are driving to Alexia’s remote family house in order to study. Alexia introduces Marie to her parents and her little brother, and the two settle for dinner. At night, the doorbell suddenly rings and Alexia’s father (Finti) goes to answer it. Marie watches from a window, in horror, as he is slashed in the face with a straight razor by a serial killer. From there, Marie attempts to keep her friend safe while trying to avoid being spotted by the killer, who slaughters Alexia’s family before kidnapping her in his van.
But not everything is as cut and clear it seems…
let’s get this out of the way first: the twist is bad storytelling
If you are in any way aware of Haute Tension, you will have at least heard something about a huge twist which recontextualizes the entire film up until that point. I have spent the last day or so reading deep dives, articles and reviews on the film and came away frustrated so I am going to do my best to tease out why it doesn’t work on a storytelling level for me.
However, Haute Tension has some very good things going for it, so let’s talk through those first before I key smash all over the place.
four things i rather liked about Haute Tension
the introduction
Over the opening credits, we see/hear three things which will prove crucial in the long run to the twist at the end. And while as I mentioned, the twist itself is bollocks, this introduction does a marvelous job at setting up the fact that something isn’t right. We see Marie (although we don’t know her yet), caked in blood and injured, limping through the woods to the road, stopping a car. We hear a continued whisper of one key phrase, in French: “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore. I won’t let anyone come between us anymore.”
And then we see Marie, from the back. She asks if “they’re recording.” She’s in a white room. And then she isn’t. She’s in the car, in the backseat, waking up from a dream as Alexia drives them through the lush countryside.
Straight away, we’re left wondering how we get from pleasant French countryside vistas (except it’s not France because the film was shot in Romania) and two friends singing along to eighties Italo Pop to whatever the heck is going on in those first few shots. It’s an excellent set-up even if it falls down by the end.
the simplicity of the story (for the most part)
Haute Tension is only Aja’s second film but it’s remarkably confident in its simplicity. Using classic slasher movie tropes - two young women, one remote location, cat and mouse game with a truly disgusting killer (more on him in a second) - and twisting them into the vibes of an exploitation film, Aja comes out with a movie that feels like a tribute to Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre run through with sinister streaks of Grand Guignol violence (two words: bookcase. beheading.)
While the story is kept simple and the dialogue is minimal (apart from at the start), composer François Eudes uses sound design to ramp up the tension, choosing sparse, clanking industrial noises that make you sit on edge. I highly recommend watching this film through headphones so you can really take in how the sound surrounds you.
Be warned, I am not responsible if you’re not able to sleep that night because you will be at least a little freaked out.
Cécile de France and Maïwenn Le Besco
The cast is sparse - aside from the two women and the killer, you don’t really spend much time with anyone else. So it’s left to leads de France and Le Besco to carry the story and they both do good jobs in their own way. de France as Marie has the most to do as she’s the one running and hiding and trying to stay one step ahead of the killer, and there are some great horror action sequences like her scramble to make the guest room look like she was never there at all, or the car chase with the killer through the forest. She does some impressive physical acting - when she exits the car, which has crashed, she moves blocky, mechanical, almost as if she’s forgotten how to move forward.
Le Besco as Alexia is, for the most part, tied up and gagged in the back of the killer’s van (his AWFUL, RUSTY murder van full of blood stains and possibly seventy kinds of infections OH MY GOD) but her facial expressions do sterling work for her. She’s a striking woman who can convey layers of fear and anger with just a blink of her eyes and it’s fascinating to watch her do so much with such a minimal amount of dialogue.
Le Tueur
Philippe Nahon plays the killer who comes to ruin the vibe and oh boy, ruin it he does. We’re introduced to him properly, sitting in his (DESGUSTANG) murder van, seemingly getting head from a woman, except not really because the woman in question is neither alive nor in possession of the rest of her body so he’s giving himself head from a head.
Nahon manages to play Le Tueur at the exact right wavelength, meaning you will have no sympathy for him, nor will you enjoy any of the scenes he is in. You will want to stand under a shower for at least five to ten minutes once the movie is over because he just manages to pull off that level of disgusting creepiness to an unnervingly good extent. The look on the gas station attendant’s face as he realizes there’s blood on Le Tueur’s fingers speaks more than any words could and the look is saying ABSOLUTELY THE FUCK NOT.
so what about that twist then?
Alright.
Marie is captured by the killer in the woods, but after a long, bloody struggle, she manages to overpower him. The scene cuts back to the police arriving at the gas station (Marie had managed to call the police earlier but wasn’t able to give an exact location) and having to call for backup because the gas station attendant is extremely dead.
As one of the officers watches the CCTV tape back, he (and the audience) discover that Marie was the one who killed the attendant. When Marie goes to free Alexia from the van, Alexia is terrified and screams at her to stay the fuck away from her. In flashes we’re told the truth: Marie has a suppressed obsession with Alexia, which she has mistaken for love. She also has dissociative identity disorder and the events we saw in the film up until this point are her point of view of the story - it’s never stated explicitly but once Marie starts chasing Alexia, Aja shows both Le Tueur and Marie alternating as chasing her.
The film ends with Marie, chained to her bed in a psychiatric hospital room. Alexia watches her through a one-way mirror and when she asks a nurse (not in shot) whether Marie can see her, Marie grins and grasps, indicating that she knows she’s there.
I am queer. I have dealt with and am still dealing with a number of mental health issues. These are lenses I view films through. My problem with this twist is that not only does it play into incredibly harmful stereotypes about queerness and lesbian women but also about mental health. Aja doesn’t keep the fact that Marie is queer hidden; although it’s never outright said, he gives us context clues, some verbal (conversations about dating where it’s implied Marie isn’t interested in any guys), some visual (none of the visual ones are subtle, there is a prolonged scene of Marie outside on the swing set at night smoking a cigarette while watching Alexia take a shower through the world’s most unfortunately placed bathroom window for fuck’s sake). Aja, as per his own words, was also absolutely not intending to invoke homophobia, saying “I don't know how you can see this movie as something against gay and lesbian people. It's not about that. It's really a friendship, love story.”
Be that as it may, when you only have one queer character and set her up to be the dangerous outsider, you are still playing into homophobic stereotypes, no matter if your intentions were a story about friendship. Yes, Marie is seen as going through the wringer to protect Alexia but all of that is for nothing given that you’ve cast her as an unreliable narrator meaning that what we see isn’t the truth of what’s happened!
Dawson Joyce goes deeper into these aspects in this essay for Medium, which I highly recommend you read as Dawson explains things far better than I could. I will add that, in addition to all of this, the twist also makes no sense as a logical endpoint for the story.
Yes, there’s the hospital scene at the start. Do you mean to tell me that that scene alone is enough for you to be able to parse this being the twist? Because there’s a multitude of ways Aja could have twisted the twist so to speak from that opening. We could have simply not had her be the killer, and the brief scene in the hospital at the start would be foreshadowing of her being in recovery from her ordeal. We could have had something more akin to Don Coscarelli’s Masters of Horror episode, Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. We could have had a simple, straightforward last girl standing situation where Marie tries to protect Alexia without being able to say to her that she loves her until it’s too late and she loses her, prompting her to go on a rampage of revenge.
This being the twist wasn’t needed. I can’t chalk it up to “it was 2003” because using poisonous gay panic and demonization of mental health issues was never okay in the first place, no matter what year this came out in. While Haute Tension does rightly sit in the canon of the New French Extremity as one of its key texts, there are some glaring faults with it, and I hope further explorations into the realm of this collection of films won’t make me feel… cheated, I guess.