High Tension

In the Globe review, High Tension's psychoanalyic argument is summarily dismissed: "What happens in the final minutes is narratively dumb -- and psychosexually ridiculous". Either regretting the film's homophobia or rejecting its illogic, most reviewers are entirely unsatisfied.

I disagree. What makes the film and its final twist interesting is that the victim has a non-standard relationship to the perpetrator. In fact, it is never clear whether both Marie and Alex are victims of a third, or whether Marie is Alex's worst nightmare. This is incredibly intelligent and has a lot of traction. Like the dream narratives horror films embrace, this one enjoys a premise of narratological uncertainty and finds no resolution. In fact, the entire film is inscribed within Marie's dream while napping in the car, so any attempt to fasten realistic windows to this frame should be seen as irrelevant.

Without overstepping the bounds of plausibility, I believe Alex is the more compelling philosophical and psychoanalytic subject here--Marie is boring since she slaps film critics in the face with a sexual origin for sociopathology. That reading follows predictable lines: Marie represses her lesbian love for Alex and would sooner kill her than permit a male to come between them. Unfortunately, this facile case is aided by the distracting sexual perversion of the male killer, Marie's final tragic mantra, as well as a collection of Marie's obsessive responses to Alex. This is a misreading of the film, for I see these weak gestures at a typical forensic--sexual repression as the only possible explanation for homicidal mania--as the very object of this film's disgust.

Keeping Alex at the center does the trick. Since she would react to the insanity of her best friend in the same way as she would to that of a stranger, she is the only character for whom the film's narrative coheres (albeit in incoherence). She doesn't need to account for the time lost as Nahon thuds about and Marie tries to escape or hide or strike back. To her, the horror doesn't make sense. It is as if the film asks for her, alongside her mother, why this is happening to her. Her confusion over the role Marie plays is as much oneiric as it is a result of the trauma she experiences all night long.

The point is thus not to wonder where Marie got the truck if she's the real culprit or what exactly happened to the dude if he never existed. The point is to remember that our unconscious is a benevolent enemy, a horrible place where love of another conflicts with self love and our friends try to kill us.

High Tension