Haute tension

Alexander Ajas High Tension initially portrays two very good female friends,
Marie and Alex, who are on a road trip to Alexs familys farm in the middle of the
country. The film depicts Maries perspective of events that lead the audience to believe
that there is a monstrous man who takes pleasure in killing Alexs immediate family and
is trying to rape the young girls. Surprisingly, about of the way through the film, we
discover that Marie herself is the psychotic killer who is hopelessly in love with her
friend Alex.
Marie is the root of conflict in High Tension, performing these disturbing and
gruesome acts subconsciously as a method of expressing intense passion, coping with the
two polar individuals trapped inside of her, and releasing the mounting frustration caused
by her inability to be with Alex in a romantic sense. In an article focusing on Gender
Representation and Monstrosity Joshua Cohen states: Studies on early horror cinema
indicate that these films present a kind of doppelganger effect that mirrors patriarchal
societys fear of female sexuality and difference. Studies on later horror films,
particularly the slasher genre, focus on repressed feminine sexuality as a source of
monstrosity(Cohen 1) Aja provides the audience with a few hints concerning Maries
sexuality and internal battle in order to foreshadow the events later in the film. During the
long car ride to the farm, Alex gives Marie a hard time about not putting enough effort
into finding the right guy, Marie repeatedly and vehemently responds by calling Alex a
slut for her late-night escapades, and it is blatant that Aja intentionally portrays Marie
(played by Cecile DeFrance) as a stereotypical early 2000s lesbian with the short hair
and rebellious punk rocker attitude. Once they get closer to the farm, Alex suddenly stops
the car and runs into a cornfield, promising Marie that she had just seen someone run into
the field and was going after them.
High Tension begins with a close-up shot that is focused on the lower back of a
woman who appears to be wearing a hospital gown. Slowly the camera tilts up to move
the shot up this womans back, subjecting the audience to graphic scars and sutures that
work their way her back. The woman begins rocking forward and backwards as if she
hopes to gain some sort of comfort from such a movement and then one can begin to hear
a noise rising in a crescendo fashion. The sound originates as a soft & natural sound such
as the pitter-patter of raindrops during a light shower. As this noise continues to grow in
volume, the audience can recognize the audio to be the diegetic whispering of the
recently sutured woman, her voice grows into a high pitched Gollum-esque tongue until
finally one can discern that she is proclaiming how she'll never let anyone come between
us (which meant nothing to us at the beginning of the film) in her eerie tone. The shot
quickly cuts to a woman who is running from something unknown in a forest until she
comes to a road. She throws herself into the middle of the road and is almost struck by a
car as she screams and waves her hands, begging for help. The car screeches to a halt and
the woman quickly gets into the car to reveal her hands are dripping with blood as the
result of attempting to prevent a deep wound in her stomach from hemorrhaging. The
shot immediately cuts to Marie admitting that she never has dreams that make sense as
she and Alex drive to the farm.

The 2 first scenes of the film, the first occurring in what appears to be a hospital
and the second scene with Marie flagging down a car in the middle of the road, are
almost identical to the situations regarding the last two scenes of High Tension. A few of
the contrasting elements of the beginning and end scenes of the movie are that: Alex is
actually running for her life from Marie in the woods as opposed to the dream where
Marie runs from herself in the woods (the car driver who pulls over to help Alex is even
the exact same man from Maries dream at the beginning of the movie) and the hospital
scene is actually shown to be a jail or psychiatric ward where Marie is held in a psychotic
and delusional state after going on a monstrous killing spree. The only real difference in
the beginning and end scenes of High Tension is the context that the audience gains from
the rest of the film. I dont even know if foreshadowing is the correct term to use in
comparing the very beginning and very end of the High Tension as Aja recycles the two
opening chronological scenes of the film by reversing their order and placing the virtually
identical situations as the final 2 scenes of his film.