“You should see the other picture I was about to send.”
I really, really love the new wave of French horror. Given that, I should have expected this to be such an unflinching, brutal bit of nastiness but was somehow still caught off guard. I’ve always thought Elijah Wood does creepy better than anything else, and that’s on full display here - think of his role in Sin City and you've got a close approximation. It’s not a novel observation at this point, but this film really is Drive with the violence turned up to 11. High-gloss cinematography, sleazy electronic score, hyper-stylized gore and alternating moments of quiet intensity and shocking bursts of violence. I thought the POV conceit worked quite well, even if they do cheat at times, pulling out to showcase a grand guignol tableaux or two. I take grim pleasure in the fact that it’s so unrelentingly bleak (again, I expected nothing less given modern French horror). There’s only two moments of levity in the entire film, both in the first act; one being a wink-wink nod to the original film, and the other that truly wicked “Goodbye Horses” aural joke. I do wish Alex Aja would so some more original properties, though. At this point, I believe the last non-remake thing he did was ‘P2’ in 2007. As much as I thought his piss-take on Piranha was a worthy pile of shits, guts, and giggles, it'd be nice to see an original vision in the vein of High Tension from him.
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