Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is an effective rumination on this moment in queer history — and equally potent bloodletting of our fears, anxieties, and hopes.
High Tension (also known as Switchblade Romance) is Alexandre Aja’s 2nd directorial feature.
Released in 2003, the French film follows a repressed lesbian staying at the family home of her best friend. As her psyche comes unwound from repressed desire, an unseen killer stalks the remote manor and begins to kill the family in horrific ways. But at the film’s climax, the audience discovers they’ve been misled — the actual killer is Marie, the repressed woman who Aja has spent most of the picture endearing us to.
This is a jarring, but effective decision. It fits square in the New French Extreme category, in that it frames socially prescient anxieties of the time with a hyper-violent and psycho-sexual light. At film’s end, Marie is alive and under psychiatric care. Her friend and object of affection, Alex, stares at her from the other side of a one-way mirror. But through it, Marie’s eye catches her, and the woman stares her victim down. Reaches for her. Aware that she is just on the other side of the wall.
