Like so many films in the New French Extremity, Alexandre Aja’s High Tension is a home invasion drama, inflected in this case through the hick horror of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The two main characters are Marie (Maiwenn) and Alex (Cecile de France), a pair of women in their early twenties spending a weekend at the rural home of Alex’s family, a middle-class couple who gave up city life to retire to a remote spot in the French countryside. At first the “local yokels” dismissed them as a “hippies who just wanted to make goats cheese,” but over the years this Boomer couple, part of the same countercultural generation that spawned the body count of Texas Chainsaw, have found a common ground with their adopted rural community – apart from one hick, that is, whose murderous spree culminates with killing Alex’s family and then focusing his attention on the two young women as the tortuous and grisly piece de la resistance of his insane scheme.

All the beats of the New French Extremity are recognisable here, especially once the killing begins – the sense of grim endurance, the grating grindhouse aesthetic, and the crushingly brutal sense of the material world, which casts an industrial grime over every object and continually emphasises the materiality of the film stock itself with a glitchy, scratchy, staticky soundtrack and editing signature. Endurance is the main register in the face of a bleakly nihilistic universe that lacks even the dark humour of some of the more provocative films in this movement – Alex’s mother’s last words are simply “Why? Why? Why?” It is a horror of textures, of abject surfaces, especially of broken skin; Aja also adheres to the NFE in his relative disinterest in gore and viscera, instead conflating the screen with the surface of the skin, rupturing both again and again to produce a totalising aesthetic of bodily pain.

Against what amounts to a fairly generic backdrop insofar as the NFE is concerned, the most memorable aspects of High Tension lie in its distinctively early 00s vision of being “off grid.” Aja frames this first and foremost through the sentient blandness of the rural landscape, which is both vacant and brimming with a nascent connectivity. All that Marie and Alex can see from their windows are fields of corn, power lines, and swirls of mist, and the connective import of those power lines is so near and yet so far once the killer strikes. In the moments before he arrives, Marie is hooked into her Walkman, and she spends the early part of the invasion suffering real physical duress – such as shifting a wardrobe by herself – in an effort to find a working phone plug that will link her to the world of the power lines just outside. Likewise, the killer plays as a forerunner of social media, collecting both photographs of faces and actual faces like he is adding “friends”; even his keyring is a weird face-shaped blob, like an avatar turned into a physical fetish, a protection against evil.

This fixation with connectivity helps contextualise the infamous twist – that the male killer has been Marie all along – which as many viewers have rightly pointed out makes absolutely no narrative sense and is a bit of a letdown for a fairly generic film that has been gesturing towards something really spectacular to make it worth the wait. Inevitably, then, this “twist” detracts from the film, and yet its very incoherence in terms of realistic physical space speaks to the emergent digital porosity that drives the horror, as the categories of invader and invaded, inside and outside, break down in ways that are meaningless within the analog world of the film, but make more sense at the fringes where a new networked space starts to glimmer. High Tension thus reiterates the profound continuum between torture horror and digital horror at the cusp of the millennium, the search for ever more extreme forms of bodily distress as a bulwark against the networked evaporation of the body altogether. That dynamic and dialectic informs the palpable incoherence on display here, in what amounts to a late iteration of Texas Chainsaw in which the killer and victim are the same person, and this gestures in turn to a diminution of the countercultural vitality that drove the horror of the original, something we also see in the grim American remake released the same year. Nevertheless, this remains one of the least impactful films in the New French Extremity, as paradoxical as that might sound, since for all its attempted intensity it’s like watching the fourth or fifth film in a well-established franchise – a bit exhausted, pared back, going through the motions, and too familiar to be truly extreme.