No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown 8: The one with a Citroen HY

 

 

Title: High Tension aka Switchblade Romance

What Year?: 2002 (copyright)/ 2003 (French release)/ 2005 (US theatrical release)

Classification: Improbable Experiment/ Mashup

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/3)

 

In the course of my movie reviews, one thing I’ve realized increasingly is that I’ve really been doing this almost as long as I’ve been writing in online formats, just with more fits and starts than usual. I have also had to admit to myself that almost everything I did before starting my reviews on this blog was unusable for the purposes of what I’m doing now. As a result, I have on occasion done a “re-review” of movies I had covered a long time ago. This time around, I have one I reviewed (kind of) that stayed with me, not in a good way, and I’m back for the rematch. Here is High Tension, a movie that single-handedly wrecks itself in the last 20 minutes.

Our story begins, after an ominous framing in a mental hospital, with two college girls Alexia and Marie on a road trip to visit Alex’s family in the French countryside. In the meantime, we get our first look at a grungy serial killer in a van that looks like it’s made entirely of aluminum siding, just finishing with the remains of his most recent victim. Things are getting awkward at the farmhouse, as it becomes clear that Marie wants to be more than a friend with Alex, then the killer arrives. In short order, he murders Alex’s parents and little brother and carries her off in the van from Hell. Marie manages to escape the massacre and climb aboard. Their only chance is for Marie to turn the tables on the creep, but the real problem is… he doesn’t actually exist??!!

High Tension was a 2003 independent French horror film directed by Alexandre Aja and cowritten with Gregory Levasseur. The film starred Cecile De France as Marie and Maiwenn as Alexia, with the late Philippe Nahon as the villain. It was released in France, then shown internationally. A significantly censored version with English dubbing was released in the United States by Lionsgate in 2005. Both versions were controversial for violence/ gore and the twist ending in which (spoiler, they deserve it) Marie is portrayed as schizophrenic and the actual killer. Roger Ebert stated, “(The) plot has a hole that is not only large enough to drive a truck through, but in fact does have a truck driven through it.” Ebert and others also complained of poor English dubbing on the Lionsgate cut. Maiwenn went on to direct several films. Nahon died in 2020, with over 200 film and TV credits. The film is available on disc and digital platforms.

For my experiences, my real frame of reference for this one is my long, rocky road through mental health self-advocacy. This has figured somewhat regularly in my movie reviews, and what I keep coming back to is that movies that try to portray mental illness are very bad at getting it right. The usual, superficial route characteristic of 1970s horror (see Picture Mommy Dead for an early and decent example) is to use a bunch of jarring images to dress up a story of little or no further substance. The somewhat more honest approach is to set up the hallucination/ delusion angle within an otherwise linear plot and narrative style, like The Cemetery Man and The Hand. As I keep ranting, the films that actually succeed at capturing mental breakdown, for better or worse, are the ones that set aside any pretense of logic and coherence and do weird for its own sake, like The Day Time Ended and Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. In this context, the present film has stood in my mind as what happens when the mental illness angle is used as pure plot contrivance by people who just don’t care.

With that laid down, I will be the first to admit that there’s a lot of good here, including the makings of a thoughtful dissection of the “rescue” wish-fulfillment fantasy. What’s most impressive is that it remains subversively unclassifiable, part slasher and the other part almost post-apocalyptic, in that respect resembling nothing less than the masterpiece Duel. On that vein, there is the absolutely unforgettable Citroen HY van, which I was literally blogging about before I got to the movie. This gets my vote as the ugliest, most brutal vehicle ever put on the road in numbers, and it’s telling that the story never pretends to question its reality (because nobody could ever imagine an HY...). What makes it work are the touches of personality, from the ominous photos on the rearview mirror to the incongruous business signage, which should be easy to trace unless, of course, the lawful owner already got dead. To me, what “works” is the damn van as the real villain, either driving its owners to madness and mayhem or attracting those already predisposed to it. In my “what if” machine, the perfect ending I picture is that Marie whacks the absolutely real bad guy, takes his van and drives off into the sunset with Alex riding shotgun, possibly with her chains still on. If the actual movie was anywhere near this clever, I would praise it highly enough to put it in my “good” movie feature.

Alas, as I’ve been ranting all along, what we got instead is very possibly the laziest, shoddiest, most gimmick-first-questions-never ending on record. The obvious problem is that there is absolutely nothing in the preceding events to suggest the characters and events are anything but real. Indeed, the hyper-graphic violence and effects go a long way to dispel any sense of unreality even if you’re looking for it, in notable contrast to the likes of Dead Alive. On top of that, the tactics and physical abilities of the pictured male killer and Marie shouldn’t really be interchangeable (an issue dealt with cleverly and without sexism in Freaky). What gets insulting for an advocate like me is that there is nothing here that obviously is hallucinatory, which is one thing even lazy-Seventies horror usually got right. Then the deepest offense is that the posited revelations still don’t fit what we saw any better than scenarios you could piece together at random. Just for example, maybe Alex killed her family, staged the abduction as her own getaway, and dragged Marie into it as a schizo who would believe in a frameup herself. And this is still arbitrarily assuming that all the characters besides the bad guy actually exist and are actually dead if we saw them die. This way lays not even the sane person’s idea of madness, but only a lazy writer’s bid for extra running time.

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with the one that’s most different from the rest of the film. I’ll mention at this point that this is the only scene I watched with the English-dub cut, which turned out to have this part still mostly in French. At the fifty-minute mark, the van is low on gas, so the party pulls into a station. We get some of our better looks at Nahon, who seems quite happy to look like a scuzzy creep you’d actually expect to see on the news. Marie darts inside, and tells the clerk to call the police. She then hides, just as the killer enters. In what should be an intriguing bit of detail, the villain speaks to the attendant with every appearance of familiarity, addressing him as Jimmy. The clerk is visibly confused but doesn’t yet seem convinced that his customer is guilty of wrongdoing. Nahon doesn’t seem to notice, turning his back to the counter as he peruses the merchandise. He rambles casually in the best character-actor tradition, briefly asking the clerk if he has ever had a girl in the store. Meanwhile, the clerk grows more awkward, and at one point we clearly him glance between Nahon and Marie, with both of them in the frame. Finally, Nahon asks to buy some liquor from a locked cabinet, and the clerk gives only a mild protest before coming out to help him. And this is precisely where I call absolute coprolite. What happens only makes sense if Nahon’s character is a real person who has a history with the clerk, regardless of what’s “revealed” later, and the movie up to at least this point must have been written and even shot taking this for granted. That leaves this scene as the most frustrating artifact of a film without the idiotic “twist” and vastly better for it.

In closing, I will freely admit that this is another film that I am treating more harshly than films that are certainly worse. For me, personal “hate” is not just allowable but the fundamental criteria for my judgment, and this is exactly the kind of film that makes me actively mad. I suppose it’s really not any worse in its portrayal of schizophrenia and mental illness than other films a lot closer to the “mainstream”. On the other hand, it came out exactly when movies like A Beautiful Mind were starting to recognize the disorder as something more than wacky multiple personalities. My final complaint is that those behind this film were a peculiarly wrong choice to take on the subject. It would take true surrealists to do this right, whereas what we got is what you can expect from competent people who do not have it in them and never will. The lesson is to know one’s limitations, and above all leave well enough alone. Be you, do what you can do well, and leave the rest to someone else. With that, I’m done.