Director: Alexandre Aja
Year: 2003
Country: France/Romania
Alternate Titles: Haute tension; Switchblade Romance
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Heading out into the countryside, a woman visiting her family with a friend finds that a vicious serial killer has targeted the house and begun killing them off one-by-one forcing them to find a way of fighting the killer and stopping him from continuing his rampage.
Review:
This here proved to be quite the fun and highly enjoyable slasher effort. One of the most impressive things about the film is the way it engages all the senses, especially sound, to create a mood of mounting dread and suspense. It's all about being haunted by the squeaks of the killer's shoes on the floor, the labored breathing as he walks up the stairs, or the dull sound his bloodied scalpel makes when he wipes it off on his overalls that play just as important role in this as anything else in the film, and it works absolutely marvelously. The first half of the film is as good as anything out there, being this mounting of suspense through an ingenious use of having the characters survive the slaughter through the house and staying just out of eye-view from the killer as every suspense trick is used with hiding in the room where the killer lurks, covering their tracks, and really depending on the presence of the killer there to get most of the suspense out of the film that really works and is quite powerful.
That plays into the fact that this is an incredibly gory film that offers a slew of highly violent and vicious bloodletting that's all the better that all of the gore was practical and CGI is nowhere to be seen. The ending does have a lot going for it as well, including a really impressive car chase that ends in a really nice stunt, tons of gore inflicted on all the participants, some incredibly clever stalking scenes, and just a relentless pace. Then there's the ending, which while it isn't the best one ever done is really clever and nicely used throughout one that does leave a lasting mark. All in all, this wasn't that bad.
Frankly, there's only one thing in here that really doesn't work, and that's the twist ending. In the attempt to blow the mind with the mega-twist that re-writes the logic of all that came before, all that is achieved instead is that it completely evaporates the plausibility of all that did come before it. This brings about so many questions that go unanswered simply by the way it goes about including the twist simply to ensure a successful unimagined twist, as there's that phone call at the gas station getting made, how the car crash happened, or what the gas-station attendant was looking at being just several of the unanswered and utterly confusing questions this leaves. That is the reason why this doesn't work, which isn't that it's a badly done twist, just an illogical one, and is the only issue holding it back.
Overview: ****/5
A tad overrated but still a good movie, there's not much holding this one back as the majority of the positives here are far more impactful on this one against that lone issue. Those who are fans of this particular style of genre fare or are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like here while those turned off by the approach should heed caution.
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