High Tension

High Tension (French: *Haute tension*, also released in some English-speaking markets as *Switchblade Romance*) is a 2003 French slasher film directed by Alexandre Aja, who co-wrote it with Grégory Levasseur. The cast includes Cécile de France and Maïwenn. The story centers on a young woman who goes with her friend to stay at the friend’s family’s remote farmhouse, where a killer arrives the same night. The movie is often linked to the New Extremity movement.

In the plot, best friends Marie and Alex head to Alex’s parents’ house for a weekend of studying. After a tour and dinner, they go to sleep. Marie stays awake in the guest room, listening to music and masturbating. She hears the doorbell; Alex’s father Daniel answers and is slashed across the face with a straight razor, then pinned between staircase spindles as a bookcase is shoved toward his head—though the decapitation is not depicted as described. The killer approaches Alex’s mother, who has been woken by the noise. Marie hides under her bed. The killer searches but doesn’t find her. Marie creeps downstairs, finds Alex chained in her bedroom, and promises to get help. She sneaks into the parents’ room for a phone, hears thuds, and hides in a closet, witnessing the killer slash the mother’s throat. Alex’s younger brother Tom flees into a cornfield, pursued by the killer. Marie sees Tom’s murder from a window. She takes a butcher knife from the kitchen, but the killer drags Alex into his truck, and Marie sneaks in to hide with her. The killer locks them in and drives away.

At a gas station, Marie gives Alex the knife and goes inside for help. She sees the store clerk killed with an axe. As the killer drives off, Marie calls the police but hangs up, unable to say where she is. She takes the clerk’s keys and follows in his car. The killer rams her vehicle off the road. Injured, Marie runs into the forest, eventually bludgeoning the killer with a barbed-wire-covered fence post. When he grabs her throat, she suffocates him with a plastic sheet. Back at the truck, Alex seems terrified of Marie. Meanwhile, police at the gas station watch security footage showing Marie murdering the clerk. It is revealed that Marie is murderous, delusional, and obsessed with Alex, having committed all the killings. Marie unties Alex, who threatens her with the knife, accusing her of butchering her family.