A group of French friends on vacation in Croatia decide to venture along a trail high up in the mountains. Cocky group leader Fred (Nicolas Giraud) imperils his athletic girlfriend Karine (Maud Wyler) while matters are further complicated by a simmering love triangle as studly bald Guillaume (Raphaël Lenglet) and token nervous guy Loïc (Johan Libéreau) vie for pretty surgical intern Chloé (Fanny Valette), who is tortured by flashbacks to a young patient who died in her care. When the gang are stranded up the mountainside, Fred gets caught inside a nasty mantrap. They are not alone and a mystery murderer turns their vacation into a nightmare.
The success of Haute Tension (2003) has seemingly ignited a strain of extreme horror movies from the normally genre-shy French film industry, although High Lane has been likened to Cliffhanger (1993) meets Deliverance (1972) and is not quite as gut-wrenchingly grim as the controversial Martyrs (2009). Debuting director Abel Ferry dives straight into the setup, sketching the troubled relationships before swiftly stranding his attractive cast up the intimidating Croatian mountaintop. Such brevity serves the film well as the story is simple, economical and effective, and though brutal downplays the genre’s usual misogyny in favour of white-knuckle suspense. The rock climbing sequences are scary enough even before the killer shows up. Ferry shows real talent for milking the tension from those vertiginous cliff tops with his disorientating camerawork.
Aside from one lapse into silliness when characters try to lift their spirits by singing along to Supergrass 1995 hit “Alright”, Ferry maintains an aura of genuine creepiness. As with Burt Reynolds in Deliverance, the arrogant survivalist is quickly crippled leaving the others that more vulnerable, while one character's grisly fate is all the more unsettling for being filmed in complete darkness. We hear only their muffled cries and whimpers. Nice to see that both female characters are gutsy and capable, not screaming bimbos, which helps turn who lives and who dies into a real surprise.
Perhaps inevitably, the latter portion of the film borrows from the great-granddaddy of all backwoods terror movies: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973). So we get the usual scenes commonly found in various Hollywood rip-offs, with survivors trapped in a torture dungeon and forced to listen to their friends being butchered. Here Ferry sadly drops the ball with the killer unmasked as some kind of kickboxing cannibal Kurt Cobain while a series of cynical twists impart a nasty dog-eat-dog theme. The concluding battle between final survivor and villain is truly gripping and brutal, but the would-be gut-wrenching sting in the tale adds nothing and comes across annoyingly inconclusive.
