PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 6/9/05)

Has a movie title ever provided a more fitting endorsement/warning than Alexandre Aja's High Tension? This is high-intensity exploitation cinema at its finest and most frustrating, a nail-biting, armrest-clutching, teeth-grinding shocker that will scare the living tar out of you, yet leave you feeling violated and abused for taking part. When it's all over, it'll take more than a long, cold shower to undo the kind of damage this movie so willfully inflincts (right down to its nasty homo-hating twist). That said, if such blatant masochism is your thing, you can hardly do better.

When Lions Gate first deigned to release this ultragraphic slasher pic stateside, the MPAA slapped it with an NC-17 rating. How they talked their way out of that one (with a few minor trims, but nothing that brings the level of gore anywhere near the realm of an R) is a complete mystery, for the English translation has lost not a single decapitation, throat slitting, or ax to the chest (the distracting dub job cost it half a star). Still, the explicit on-camera effects, frighteningly convincing though they appear, don't come anywhere near the genius of High Tension's sound design.

If you consider the entire movie as a well-calibrated exercise in audience manipulation, then the sound design is undeniably the ingredient that holds it all together. From the killer's heavy breathing to the rubber-squishy sound of his boots creaking across the floorboards, every little noise has been carefully inserted to agonize the audience. Even the aural details of light switches, door latches, and the wind contribute to the gradual fraying of our nerves. Consider the scene in which our heroine goes running into a darkened cornfield in the middle of the night. The rustling stalks and crazy cutting from one disorienting camera angle to another is enough to give you a heart attack, and yet nothing happens.

Never fear. Things start happening soon enough. In fact, the violence escalates with astonishing, brutal speed. Ever the sadist, Aja drives us mad by forcing his two heroines (Cécile de France as a wide-eyed deer in the headlights and Maïwenn as her hogtied and horse-toothed love interest) to make the worst possible decision at every turn. Cécile's constantly cornering herself when the killer is near, and when she grabs a gun, it's only natural that the bullets should turn up in the killer's hand. Borderline reprehensible, High Tension is a living nightmare, but then, why else would you see it?—Peter Debruge