Haute Tension: Final* Girl

It’s years in the rear-view mirror by now, but one of the through-lines for what got me writing about horror movies for fun was the New French Extremity. It’s not a label anyone really uses anymore, which is probably for the better, since - at least in terms of horror films - the whole thing sort of fizzled out quickly. To the extent it ever was a movement (which is debatable), it produced some excellent films, and some absolute turkeys.

Haute Tension (High Tension) is one of the most frequently mentioned examples of New French Extremity, but I have to say, it’s much closer to the turkey end of the continuum. What we basically have is an effective, if workmanlike, slasher film that starts off strong before being marred by a slack third act and what has to be one of the most head-clutchingly ridiculous twists I’ve ever seen in a film.

We begin at what is presumably the end. There’s a woman sitting on an examination table in a hospital gown. Through the gap in the gown, we can see that her back is striped with deep cuts and abrasions, some severe enough to need stapling shut. There’s a camera recording her as she mumbles something about nothing keeping “us” apart again. Then we flash back to this same woman, running through some woods, covered in blood. Something bad has happened, but we have to go back to the beginning to understand it. Marie (the young woman from the introduction) and her friend Alex are college students, off to Alex’s family home in the country to study for exams, far away from the distractions of the city. No booze, no parties, no boys. Lots of winding country roads, and they pass by a truck driver parked on the shoulder in a rusty cargo van. It becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s got someone else in the truck with him, in the act of fellating him. But Marie and Alex have driven on by this point. And they’re long gone by the time the truck driver tosses what turns out to be a severed head out the window. It’s a striking moment, I’ll give it that.

Meanwhile, Marie and Alex arrive at Alex’s house, and after meeting her folks and her little brother, Marie repairs to her guest suite to get some rest. It’s late at night, it’s been a long day, and it’s been a long drive.

It’s late at night, and there’s a knock on the door.

So I’d say it sets its stall out early, but in a way that really effectively builds the tension of the title. We’re introduced to Marie and Alex, take some time to get to know them and their whole deal, and then this sudden, shocking segment with the truck driver gets dropped into the story like a time bomb before returning to these young women on the road. Something very bad is going to happen, but it’s not going to happen yet, and now that we know this lunatic is out there, we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Marie and Alex and Alex’s family are all blissfully unaware of what’s headed straight for them. In some ways, it reminds me of how the original Halloween teased Michael Myers through the better part of the film, always just slightly out of frame or out of focus or partially hidden behind scenery. The longer he’s out there, the worse it gets.

And I’ll say this, when this film works, its stock in trade is definitely tension. Once night falls, it doesn’t really take long for things to pop off. And once they do. they don’t really let up. We don’t really know anything about any of these people apart from Maria and Alex both being sort of party girls and Alex’s family seeming nice enough. But at least for the first couple of acts, sheer momentum gets the film over in the absence of much emotional investment in any of the characters. Once the action starts, it doesn’t really slow down. It’s a violent film (as slashers often are), but the violent segments are a mixture of off-camera restraint and almost confrontationally detailed. We don’t always see what’s happening, but what we do see is more than enough. There’s a lot of blood in this movie, spattering and pooling and spraying, and a lot of people in visible distress, and if it doesn’t always linger on the violence it does linger on their suffering and pain. It’s a grubby film as well – a lot of it is shot in sort of a sickly yellow that makes everything look sort of stained or used, at least outside of the farmhouse setting, and the killer is oily, sweaty, and grimy in a filthy jumpsuit, dirt under his nails, as bestial as his introduction would have you think. He doesn’t talk much, mostly just grunts as he brutalizes everything in his path. Crisp editing helps to keep the action moving, Marie trying to avoid this sudden menace in the confines of a fairly cozy farmhouse, so for the first couple of acts, it’s a film in almost constant motion. But that’s the first couple of acts. The third is where everything falls apart.

First, the film, despite being a French production, is dubbed into English, and although it isn’t too distracting at first (there is the odd verbosity you get when you’re trying to fit dialogue in one language to the speech patterns of another), as the film goes on more and more of the dialogue is in French and subtitled in English, and any attempt to make dubbed dialogue fit the actors’ speech goes right out the window.. It doesn’t seem like a stylistic choice, as much as someone just stopped doing their job. Why it wasn’t all in French and subtitled from the get-go is a mystery. I don’t know that it would have saved the film, but it would have seemed like less of a rush job. And for all of the tension of the beginning of the film, once the action moves away from the farmhouse the pace grows looser and looser until we’re left with a not-especially-exciting “chase scene” that consists of two cars driving at a sensible speed through the woods, capped by increasingly ludicrous levels of violence - cartoonish in a way that earlier moments weren’t - and false endings. It goes from claustrophobic and…well, tense…to something much more bland and formulaic.

But the worst of it has to be a reveal in the third act that makes very little sense in term of literally everything that came before. I don’t mind twists, for the most part. But a good twist relies on the film playing fair with the audience up to the moment it’s revealed, so that rewatching it (or even getting the flashback that spells it all out) gives you the opportunity to put the pieces together yourself, to see how the truth was staring at you the whole time. Clever use of misdirection and new context goes a long way, but this isn’t like that at all. It’s not just that there’s no opportunity to figure it out, or even anything we could observe that might suggest that not everything is as it seems. We actually see things throughout the film that actively contradict it. You can use clever staging of shots to hide things in plain sight, but this film doesn’t bother. It just…I guess for lack of a better term, it just straight-up lies about everything we’ve just seen, for no apparent reason. It adds nothing to the film except sort of a cheap “gotcha” moment. The end result is the feeling that the filmmakers had about an hour’s worth of a decently suspenseful if not especially substantive movie and realized they needed to come up with another thirty minutes, so they just sort of winged it. And it shows. In the sloppy dubbing, in a climax that wanders aimlessly, in a last-minute revelation that makes absolutely no sense, it fucking shows.

This is a film that gets mentioned as one of the biggest of the New French Extremity (for what little that’s worth), but it’s easily one of its biggest disappointments. It doesn’t have Martyrs’ well-crafted story, or Inside’s claustrophobic, confrontational tone. It’s closer to something like Frontier(s), with its reliance on blood and screaming and active contempt for storytelling. I was spoiled for the big twist going in (part of why I’ve taken so long to write about it) and I was still surprised at how half-assed it was. The more I think about this film, the angrier I get.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Hermana Muerte: I Saw The Light

As far as I’m concerned, prequels are worse than sequels, and heaven knows I don’t like sequels. Horror thrives on mystery, and prequels and sequels alike tend to dismantle that mystery. Sequels tend to belabor what worked so well in the original films, but now we’re expecting it, so its power is lost. Prequels, on the other hand, strip away the unknown from the original film. I don’t want origin stories for my monsters, I want them to be unknowable and terrifying. I want them to be facts of the world, irreducible.

Well, most of the time. There are always exceptions. Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking that I wouldn’t mind seeing a Lovecraftian take on Breaking Bad, about a man who turns to dark rituals out of desperation and gradually loses everything. I’d watch that. But back to the matter at hand. Hermana Muerte (Sister Death) works as a prequel to the very good demonic possession film Veronica for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a fully realized story about an incidental character from Veronica, and second, because it’s put together with skill. That said, while it’s well-constructed, I found it an easier film to appreciate than to fully like or engage with.

The film begins in Spain, in 1939, with scratchy, home-movie footage of a little girl in a small village. She’s clutching a cross and staring ecstatically into the sky. People crowd around her as she appears to witness something, to see something only she can see. She kneels, arms spread wide in supplication or in a reenactment of the crucifixion. It’s hard to say. Ten years later, a young woman in a novice’s habit walks up to a convent, bleached white under the midday sun. It’s the little girl, all grown up. Her name is Narcisa, and after years of being locally celebrated as “The Holy Child,” she’s come here to take her final vows. Before the civil war, it was a cloistered convent, but what sisters were able to make it back have re-opened it as a school for underprivileged girls. Narcisa will be teaching classes as a replacement for Sister Ines. The sisters are…evasive…about her departure.

All seems about as well as it can - the girls learn lessons alongside performing chores around the convent, the better to provide them with skills that will be useful to them once they reach adulthood and have to find employment - or a husband. But there are little things - children’s balls that come rolling down the hallway with no girls in sight. Games of Hangman that appear on the walls. Loud banging and weeping in empty hallways.

Girls that have disappeared, never to be seen again.

The thematic spine of this movie is the way people and nations have to grapple with their past and the things that haunt them. Narcisa experienced an ecstatic vision of the Virgin Mary as a child, and has been wracked by doubt ever since, even as she became something of a local celebrity. Was it a vision sent from God, or the Devil? Why won’t God send her a sign that what she saw was divine? She prays, she fasts, she mortifies her flesh, still nothing. Some of the sisters see her taking the vows as a good thing, the “Holy Child” dedicating herself to God, but others believe she’s a charlatan, or worse. It seems like part of Narcisa wants to run away from all of it, the pressure, the expectations, the resentment, the burden of being her, but wherever she goes, there she is. Likewise, the sisters of the convent are still wrestling with the fallout from the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Spain. The way the convent was ransacked, the sisters who were lost, the ones who left and never came back. The war is over, but its reminders are all around them. Bullet holes pock the convent’s entrance, and the Mother Superior says that no amount of lime will ever cover them. Everyone and everywhere is scarred. The convent’s bloody history is written into its walls, sunken deep into its stone, and the sisters really, really don’t want to talk about it.

And dark secrets are the spine of the majority of ghost movies. This one is no different, following pretty standard narrative beats - lots of little things like chairs tipping over by themselves, footsteps when there’s nobody there, mysterious noises, somebody’s mementos left forgotten in the back of a closet, pictures missing from a photo album, the usual. And, of course, all of this leads Narcisa to start asking questions and digging into things nobody wants exhumed. The first act is slow, maybe even a bit meandering as Narcisa keeps experiencing things she can’t explain when she’s awake and oddly specific nightmares when she’s asleep. At the same time she’s getting a sense of how the convent and school work, but it’s all very gradual and understated. Things start to cohere a little more in the second act as Narcisa learns more – there’s a ghostly girl that all the students are afraid of and that the sisters (of course) insist doesn’t exist. They’re very, very keen on drumming that nonsense out of the girls’ heads and very upset when Narcisa take the girls seriously…just like Sister Ines did. Of course, Narcisa is going to continue sticking her nose where the sisters don’t want her to, out of a sense of guilt and a need to make good on her legacy as the local miracle. There are, of course, consequences, setting us up for a third act that does a good job of making up for a relatively static two-thirds as everything sort of goes off at once. Narcisa recapitulates her childhood with visions that are far less ecstatic and much more revelatory, past and present come together, like a piece of paper folded over in half, and all becomes clear, and there is a great and bloody atonement for the sins of the past. Just because you refuse to acknowledge something, that doesn’t make it go away.

Ultimately, this is pretty frustrating film for me, as it’s very well-made, but it ended up leaving me sort of cold. It has its startling moments (and the climax does a lot of the work here) but a lot of it isn’t anything especially novel early on, either narratively or visually, so it maybe doesn’t have the impact it could. More so than Veronica, it hews to very classic storytelling techniques and imagery, and though I like it when filmmakers appreciate the classics, in this case it feels like I’ve seen a lot of this before. That is, when I can see at all – part of the problem with filming inside a convent is the lack of lighting, so a number of scenes are dark enough that it’s difficult to make out what’s supposed to be happening and I think some moments that were meant to be revelatory or shocking got lost. But this eases up as the film goes on, as if more and more light is being let in as the truth becomes known, and there are shots that somehow manage to be beautiful and bloody at the same time. It’s not uneven, but it does take a little while to really get going, and the evenness sometimes feels static.

To its credit, it’s not a prequel to Veronica in any kind of franchise origin story way. The degree to which it intersects with that film is that this is the story of an incidental character from Veronica, a character I described as “the obligatory creepy nun,’ and it’s a story entirely her own, with no attachment to the story it precedes. This is the story of the obligatory creepy nun in her youth, before she was the imposing figure who had seen some shit (and relinquished her sight as a result). As in Veronica, eclipses play an important role, and the whole thing ends with Narcisa recapitulating her childhood before we move to the present and meet Veronica and her classmates, unaware of what is yet to come for them. It all fits together neatly, and it’s a film where nothing is gratuitous, but I wish it inspired more than a polite clap.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Gwledd: Conspicuous Consumption

There’s something about the wilderness - there’s an uneasiness to our relationship with it, a wariness. Even people who love the wilderness acknowledge that it is not safe. Like our wariness of the dark, I think it goes back to our earliest days as a species, when things lying in wait in the dark, or the forest, or the long grass, or the lake, could leap out and end us. And just like we light fires against the dark, we build walls to keep the wilderness out. Modernity is not just about ease and comfort, but also about protection. A reassurance that yes, we have tamed the wilderness, and it can no longer hurt us.

Of course, this is a foolish idea, and Gwledd (The Feast) is a sharply and skillfully told story about how we presume mastery over the wilderness at our peril.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is a diesel-powered drill boring into the earth, like something you might use to explore for oil or take core samples. Its operator lurches away from the drill, staggers across the green, green fields, and collapses insensate, blood leaking from under his ear protection.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is also a house, and the entire story takes place here and in the surrounding woods. Inside, a family is getting ready to host guests for dinner. There’s Glenda - a farm girl who married up, upon whose family property the house is built. There is Gwyn, a successful politician and Glenda’s husband, and their two sons, Guto and Gweirydd, both of whom seem profoundly out of place, city boys plucked from their flats and set down in the middle of rolling hills and tall trees. Glenda is nervous - she doesn’t host often and she’s eager to make a good impression. She’s arranged for Lynwen, a young woman who works at the nearby village pub, to come out and assist with food preparation, service and cleanup. But Lynwen wasn’t able to make it, and recommended Cadi, who also works at the pub, in her place. Cadi turns up, oddly quiet, at the gate to their property. No car, no bus, no bicycle. One minute she isn’t there, and the next she is.

As if she appeared from thin air.

So you’ve got an obviously wealthy family with a nice, aggressively modern home out in the middle of the country, and the entire story takes place over the course of a single day. The film begins by sketching in the family, who they are and who they are to each other. There’s an ambivalence to Glenda - she seems proud that she’s erased almost all signs of her rustic upbringing by tearing down the old family home, but made a point of saving old quilts and blankets and one of her mother’s old dresses. The abstract painting in the dining room is a rendition of the property and its boundaries. She has left home, and she has never left home. Gwyn is a gruff, emotionally distant man’s man who likes to sit out in the woods, sip whiskey and shoot rabbits that he then leaves Glenda, the former farm girl, to skin. Guto is a troubled bad boy, floppy hair, electric guitar and neck tattoo, who liked living in London, with its parties and easy access to heroin. Gweirydd, has temporarily dropped out of medical school to train for a triathlon, and right off the bat there’s something dissolute and unwholesome about him.

They could have been a poor little rich family caricature, but they aren’t entirely. There’s a restraint to their depiction that keeps things from getting too histrionic (until it’s right for them to do so). You do get the expected beats for this sort of story, but they aren’t the sum total of these people. Glenda fusses and orders Cadi about, but isn’t above helping to make the food, even joining in with Cadi when she starts singing an old familiar song. Gwyn is very much the potentially corrupt politician, but doesn’t seem especially unlikable or abusive and seems to genuinely see his office as a privilege. He has appetites, yes, but they’re human-scale. Guto and Gweirydd are the resentful children you expect, but they aren’t raging assholes and they have their reasons. Guto is irresponsible and directionless, but he’s sensitive and passionate. Gweirydd  does seems like the kind of rich dilettante who decides he’s going to take a break from med school to be an athlete, but like Guto, he seems wounded by his father’s disapproval and emotional distance. The cliches are there, but everyone seems actual like people underneath those cliches. And Cadi floats through all of this, almost entirely silent.

And in that sense, Cadi sets the tone for the film. It’s not especially dialogue-heavy (several minutes elapse before anyone speaks at all), nor does it have music outside of a few diegetic pieces. It tells its story through silence and its sharp interruption. The film is punctuated across its running time by title cards that move from innocuous (“I want to make a good impression”) to disquieting (“She mustn’t be awakened”) and by scenes and segments that play out quietly until something ends the quiet – a scream, a gunshot, a piercing sound, a shocking act, cutting to the next scene and its relative quiet abruptly, so we don’t have time to fully process what’s just happened. It could threaten to become cliched or repetitive, but it doesn’t. It adds to a feeling of inevitability, like a steady march. 

And it's chilly and austere, all overcast countryside and a home that’s made out of sharp angles, glass, bleached wood and brick with more than a hint of the mid-century modern about it. Shots are artfully composed, themselves all lines and angles and figures placed in relation to the house, or each other, differences in focus and glass between them,  with good use of slow fades and superimposition. It’s a slow burn, but one that lets you know, however subtly, or not that something is wrong right off the bat, and it’s content to build the unease and the surrounding story in the background, through asides and details dropped in gradually. The first two acts are table-setting (in some cases literally) but there’s a constant drip of unease. You know immediately something bad is going to happen, even if the shape of it isn’t immediately apparent. Some things that start little and start early become big and bad by the end, some things are revealed late to good effect, some things you may be able to see coming from early on, but not in a way that gives it all away. This film is exceptionally good at giving you bits of information gradually and allowing you to make the connections yourself.

And when it all comes to a head halfway through the third act, it does so in blood and flame and screams. There’s one bit of what I thought was unnecessary flashback and there’s some brief montage at the end that felt unnecessary and sort of tacked-on, but these are minor quibbles. It’s another excellent addition to the fine British tradition of films about the pagan power of nature and the awful cost of disregarding it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon