The 2003 French horror hit High Tension is remembered by many for its surprising twist ending, but that twist doesn't stand up to scrutiny. From time to time, a certain type of foreign horror catches on for a period with American horror fans. For example, the 2000s saw lots of Asian ghost movies, such as The Ring and The Grudge, gain popularity, even leading to remakes. The 1980s saw surreal, nightmare-like films from Italian directors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci make their way stateside.
Another trend in foreign language horror catching on in America was the New French Extremity wave of films in the 2000s. One of the flag bearers of this movement in horror was High Tension, aka Haute Tension, aka Switchblade Romance. Directed by Alexandre Aja, High Tension focuses on two female friends who head to one of their parents' houses for a relaxing weekend. That is until a serial killer shows up and invades the home, not hesitating to kill said parents and target the two friends next.
Or at least that's what High Tension first appears to be about. As anyone who's seen the film can attest, the story ends with a shocking twist that casts everything the viewer has seen into doubt. The problem is, while it might at first satisfy, the twist doesn't hold up to any kind of real examination.
High Tension's Ending Twist Isn't As Good As You Remember
High Tension's twist ending sees Marie (Cecile de France), one of the two friends at the center of the story, revealed to have been the killer the whole time. Marie was in fact secretly in love with her best friend Alex, and also a delusional, psychotic, murderer. It's certainly a surprising development, and even more surprising is that both Marie and Alex survive the film. However, as clever as the twist might first appear, it doesn't hold up. Even granting the fact that much of the story was seen from Marie's unreliable point of view, Marie would've needed to be in two places at once to pull off a murder spree even remotely like the one depicted in High Tension.
The most egregious example of this actually comes very early in High Tension, when the killer - a man in Marie's delusions - is seen sitting in a truck performing a sex act with a victim's severed head. The problem is, as presented in the film, Marie and Alex had yet to even arrive at the town in which the killer was apparently already present. Plus, if the male killer exists only in Marie's mind, it makes absolutely no sense that the audience would be shown a scene in which he appears to operate entirely independently of where Marie is at the time. Aja is a very talented director, and has gone on to make quite a few great films, but the script he co-wrote fails High Tension, rendering the twist illogical and confusing.