Two college girls take a trip out to their parents house in the middle of nowhere for a week of nothing but studying. No boys, no parties, just book work so they can make it through the rest of college and get on with their lives.

Marie and her best friend Alex are visiting Alex's family homestead in the secluded countryside. In a terrifying and unprovoked attack, Alex's entire family is murdered, and she finds herself hog-tied in the back of the killers van. Marie witnesses the carnage while avoiding the killers detection. Now she is the only one that can save Alex.

What follows is Marie's attempts to rescue her friend from the madman's clutches, and try and kill the bastard before he can destroy anyone else's lives. It's simple, straightforward tension (oddly, the French title translates in English to "High Voltage", I'm not too sure why) and it's done with skill and grace. The grainy, dark quality to it has nothing to do with a bad DVD transfer, this is the way it was shot…to make you feel dirty.

Possibly one of the most appropriate film titles of all time, High Tension doesn't fail to deliver exactly that.

The words "French fim" and "slasher" are two that one would rarely associate with each other. As the inventors of cinema however, who better than they to bring a fresh light to the genre. It's been a long time since a horror film has had any kind of impact on me, years of desensitisation, and the poor efforts of a tightly censored Hollywood industry had given me little hope that I would once again be able to feel something other than boredom. High Tension, on the other hand, kept me in various states of shock and agitation, I think I kept a hand tightly over my mouth, which frequently changed from clenched teeth to jaw agape through almost the entire film.

Director Alexandre Aja does a masterful job of knowing when to hold back, and when to let go. Let me say this though, when let go, this film really let's go. All the murders bar one(that of Alex's younger brother, who must be less than 10 years of age) are ferocious in their extremity, accompanied by liberal amounts of the red red kroovy, blood flows like claret in High Tension. It doesn't waste time either, the family is killed within the first fifteen minutes, leaving the remaining sixty minutes filled with a nervous ride in the back of the killers van, a missed opportunity for freedom at a gas station, a road chase and, of course, a bracing climax. And what's a French film without a twist, for once, it's a twist that I did not see coming. It also left me with almost as many questions as it answered, but I won't spoil it here.

This film is not for children or the faint of heart!