Haute Tension

Saw Haute Tension, a clever little horror film. It follows two female students, a blonde and a brunette, who are going out to visit the brunette's family in the country. All seems nice but sure enough, a slouching fat man in an industrial jumpsuit (with a collar peeking out of the top which is indeed sky blue) and a handy straight razor comes a-calling. The blonde girl is obviously the protagonist and, seeing as we've already dispensed with the mandatory fake-out-"I totally got you!"-scares, all signs point to bog-standard, single-female-survivor-style, boiler-plate horror.

Well, almost all signs that is. At the very beginning of the movie, we are watching a dream the blonde is having where she is running through the woods, covered in cuts and blood, screaming for help. When she wakes up, she tells the brunette about it, adding that she was running from herself. The blonde has a boyish pixie cut and is revealed to be a virgin. She wields a knife and a gun in self-defense and at one point hides from the bad guy in a men's room. She seems to be coded as male (or perhaps as lesbian, though all the phallic symbols would be a really shitty way to make that connection, so probably not.) Most tellingly of all: the killer only shows up at the house while the blonde is masturbating. He rings the doorbell at the moment of orgasm. So we can definitely tell that something is seriously up very early on.

All of these phallic symbols eventually coalesce into a plot point so I'll leave it here, but the film is pretty clever. Its primary aim is to shock and terrify and it doesn't do a superlative job of that. Either I was strong or the film was weak but I didn't go scurrying to my volume knob like I usually do and I don't think I ever jumped. The tension is not particularly haute, but the film is clever and it's fairly fun watching this blonde girl squirm and writhe and try to stay alive in the face of placid, dull, implacable evil. I suspected the film was also doing something about the class struggle what with the blue-collar vs female students thing but in retrospect I think that was just me reading too much into a shirt collar.

Not a bad film, it entertains and repulses with gore rather than jumps leaving it a bit tame but very engaging none the less. The little symbolism games are fun but not particularly inspired (they tie into the plot and don't actually serve as commentary or a statement or anything transcendent like that.) Like I say, a clever little horror film.