10 Horror Movies Ruined By ONE Thing
2. The Nonsensical Plot Twist - High Tension
Perhaps no horror film in history has been as violently derailed by a godawful twist ending as Alexandre Aja's gut-wrenching slasher flick High Tension.
For the overwhelming majority of its runtime, this is a lean, mean, ultra-violent cat-and-mouse chase movie as two female students, Marie (Cécile de France) and Alexia (Maïwenn), flee from an unrelenting male serial killer.
Aja doesn't seem to pay much mind to the killer's identity, enough that audiences will surely assume it isn't really the point. Instead, it's simply that these two women are trying to escape a seemingly unstoppable murderous force. But the third act drops an absolute clanger of a twist, that the killer has actually been Marie the entire time, and we've been watching the story from her unreliable, dissociated perspective, where she envisions the killer as a figment of her imagination.
The problem is that this introduces so many apparent plot holes, where Marie appears to be in two places at once. And even if you accept that Marie's perspective can't be trusted, it just feels like a cheap way to cheat the audience as there's virtually no way for them to figure out the twist ahead of time.
It's a damn shame, as the more straight-forward film leading up to this dopey reveal was actually pretty fantastic.