Unnecessarily Length Horror Roundup #3: Audition, High Tension, Inside (Or: Women Doing More Than Just Running Around And Dying For Once)
Or, if you're an insufferable snob: Odishon, Haute Tension, A l'interieur.
I'm grouping these together because they're three foreign horror films that aim to smack the shit out of our lazy horror. Audition in particular was a film I had to muster my courage over the course of a week to actually watch; almost every review I'd read had articulated this basic sentiment: 'I am well accustomed to horror films, nothing bothers me, and this film made me vomit out my heart which is what it says on my tombstone because I am now dead.'
Left: A curiously unsettling shot of a chair (Audition).
Center: Cecile de France, who somehow manages to be a petite badass. (High Tension).
Right: Beatrice Dalle, who is just goddamned excellent, and more than a little frightening (Inside).
I want to clarify something before I begin: I am not what they call a gorehound. I do not specifically love or seek out gore. I like tension and emotional impact, as in Repulsion or Death Proof. It's just that good horror also often coincides with gore, and when I get the impression that such a film is emotionally substantial, I'm interested regardless of whether or not there's violence involved.
Audition (Odishon)
Audition is a horror film in the style of Psycho in that it's a character study horror; there's no monster and no body count, and if Miike had ended the film an hour in, the result would actually have stood on its own as a very melancholy, understated, and occasionally funny drama.
But it doesn't end; it continues on through some horrible stuff that made numerous people walk out of the inital screening. I won't go into detail, but Miike supposedly intended to end the film after its first moments of infamous horribleness and before what is now its climax. I'm in the minority here, because I believe it may have been more effective that way; certainly darker and probably more powerful, because its conclusion would have been left for us to imagine, to wake up in a cold sweat for years to come, overwhelmed with half-remembered nightmares about the cruelest tortures we could conceive.
Audition is a rare film, in that it's good but I can recommend it to almost nobody because people would detest and shun me for doing so. They'd show up on my doorstep in the middle of the night, years later, a hollow look in their eyes, begging to understand what in the hell was wrong with me that I'd forced this experience upon them. Images seen can't be unseen, and one thing I can guarantee is that Audition contains stuff you're not likely to forget.
After all that, though, it's not that Audition succeeds because of the disturbing elements for which it's so well known. The buildup is what works best, probably because of reviews like this one. The titular audition is mostly funny, and then there's this girl, and you're straining to discern some indicator of her veiled psychosis. The lengthy exposition also serves to flesh out our sympathetic, pitiable protagonist, and caring about a character is the first step to effective tension.
Speaking of tension.
High Tension (Haute Tension)
I am a goddamned segue champion. Anyway, I had the misfortune to read about High Tension's twist ending before I saw the film, which ruined essentially all of its suspense (don't follow the twist-related link if you intend to see it). Again, though, I'm in the minority here, because I didn't feel that the twist was as God-awful as most people seem to think. I don't like when a film relies on a gimmicky twist to work, but most of the outcry surrounding High Tension seems to be that the twist is too illogical, not that it's superfluous. That's true, I suppose, but a lack of narrative logic doesn't especially bother me. I'm accustomed to that, and I can accept that what I've seen can be an expression of something other than literal fact.
Cecile de France is excellent, and if I hadn't known the ending in advance, I'd have enjoyed the experience a lot more. I recommend High Tension if you can handle violence and possess a forgiving mentality, but do yourself a favor and look for the subtitled version. The quality of the English dub falls somewhere below that of old Godzilla movies.
Speaking of subtitles.Inside (A l'interieur)
I am on a roll. My subtitles were pretty useless during Inside. The video kept skipping, so the subs were off by almost two minutes by the end of the film, and I had to keep pausing to realign them. And as far as the content is concerned, a few scenes struck me as somewhat silly or unnecessary.
But holy shit.
I'm absolutely shocked that this film was made by two first-time directors with no budget. If you want a really tense horror film that makes a jaded man cringe, this is it. Both lead actresses are excellent, and the film exhibits this rare simplicity you typically only find in stage adaptations. After the exposition, the bulk of the film takes place entirely in three rooms and a hallway. It's exceedingly violent, and some of that violence seemed a little superfluous, because the tension alone could have carried this film. I suppose some audiences are drawn explicitly to that kind of thing, though, so I won't complain, because for the most part it's very well done.
The ending is sort of telegraphed by the earlier scenes if you find the time to think about it, but you probably won't if you're not stopping every five goddamned minutes to fix your subtitles. I'll say this, though: if I ever wind up teaching a film class, I'll make sure my students can tolerate some serious violence and then screen this film. It's an almost perfect example of executing a simple concept without all the unnecessary Hollywood shit that usually only serves to draw you out of a tense, frigthening situation.
Incidentally, when I saw Inside, the directors had been slated to write and direct a remake of Hellraiser, and if that had happened I'd have broken my going-to-theaters ban to see their effort. Instead the writing duties have been passed to some infantile hacks, over a timing issue of all things. "To hell with artistry!" the studio heads bellowed, waving their Blackberries. "Hurry up and shit out some intolerable garbage by January!"
