High Tension

Two students drive to a farmhouse in the country. A man in a truck arrives in the night.

Alexandre Aja shoots the first hour as a very well-made, very brutal home-invasion film, with a sustained sequence of Marie hiding in the house while the killer works through the family that is as tense as anything in the decade.

Then there is a twist, and the twist does not survive the flashbacks the film has already shown you. Almost everybody agrees it is a cheat, and the argument is only about whether the first hour is good enough to forgive it.

It is. The staircase sequence and the cornfield are superb.

It was cut in the UK and the US, and the uncut version is the one that circulated on disc.