Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: The Scarlett Johansson vehicle Lucy is the latest action-packed import from EuropaCorp. For the next five days, we highlight some of the French studio’s finest offerings—including a few without gunfights and car chases.
High Tension (2003)
High Tension belongs to that special subgenre of horror dubbed New French Extremity, a filmmaking movement that began in the late ’90s, taking its cues from artists like the Marquis De Sade, David Cronenberg, and other masters of the obscene. Cynics sniff that the New French Extremist movies are just an accent removed from something like Hostel, but critics enjoy dissecting how the movement’s transgressive participants put their Francophile spin on typical horror tropes. The rubric stretches to include harsh movies of all varieties: Catherine Breillat’s high-brow sex dramas could fit the bill—what with their tortured and torturous bodies—but so could something as brutishly simple as a French slasher flick like High Tension. What these films have in common is brutality. Whether it’s a great idea to subject oneself to such endurance tests is another question.