In a 2000s horror landscape that saw the rise of torture porn, not to mention a clutch of horror remakes that were trying to out-shock their originals, it was going to take something pretty gnarly to stand out from the crowd. Enter Xavier Gens, who took the reigns from New French Extemity baiting horror flicks like Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension and gave us Frontier(s), a vicious tale of survival, cannibalism and right-wing politics that strived to be as inflammatory and controversial as it possibly could.
Matching scenes of uncompromising brutality with such gore-soaked American cousins as Hostel, Saw and the Hills Have Eyes remake, Gens’ feature debut drew a lot of comparisons with similar films, but years later, long after the gallons of spilt blood has dried, the real driving force of Frontier(s) lies within a simple, sobering, question. What if the derranged family from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were also Nazis?
In a Paris rocked by furious riots over the nomination of a far-right candidate for the French presidency, we find a gang of Muslim Arab youths fleeing from the police after using the chaos to stage a robbery. Ironically, the money stolen was supposed to help them flee an increasingly tumultuous Paris, but after one of their number, Sami, catches a bullet, their exodus is interrupted. While Sami’s sister, Yasmine and her ex-boyfriend, Alex, take the wounded youth to the hospital, ringleader Tom and Farid drive out of the city with the money in order to find a safe place to lay low and find a remote, family run inn located on the border.
From there, it’s tough to say who gets the worse deal – while Yasmine watches her brother succumb to his wound and then has to flee the alerted police, Tom and Farid find that their choice of hideout is incredibly odd indeed. You see, unbeknownst to the two wannabe outlaws, the inn isn’t just run by a family of neo-Nazis, it’s run by a family of cannibal neo-Nazis who first try to seduce them and then get violent at the flick of a switch and after a brief chase, a wounded Tom and Farid end up stranded at the bottom of a mine shaft.
With their colleagues unable to warn then, Yasmine and Alex head to the inn with no clue as to what awaits them and before you know it, all four members find themselves trapped and brutalized in various, inhuman ways much to the amusement of tyrannical patriarch Von Geisler.
However, things seem extra grim for Yasmine as she’s currently pregnant with Alex’s baby and when Geisler finds out, he figures he has finally found a way to continue his family’s fucked line with some fresh, new blood and a whole tidal wave of pain.
As any who has had to withstand the hurricane of misery that is Xavier Gens’ apocalyptic, 2011, grim-fest The Divide, will attest to, this is a director who has no qualms wallowing in the filth and the viscera in order to provide the most unsettling experience that he can. Much like the aforementioned Haute Tension, Frontier(s) seems to have something to prove to the stuffier fringes of French moviemaking and it ruthlessly over compensates by being as thoroughly unpleasant as it possibly can.
However, while Haute Tension attempted to achieve it with confounding plot twists and the staggering sight of a man pleasuring himself with a severed head, Gens has somewhat loftier ambitions for his cinematic endurance test and throws in a spot of politics to make things extra haunting. Essentially tackling the subject of rising racism by having Paris battered by flaming cars and vast social unrest thanks to the rise of a fiercely right-wing political candidate who seems a shoo-in for the presidency, he further muddied the waters by not making his leads white as the desperate group of young Muslim Arabs seem willing to do anything to escape the turmoil. This, of course, makes their run in with an inbred family of batshit Nazis all the more ironic as they’ve not only run right into the clutches of the very thing they’re fleeing from, but they’ll have to fight tooth and nail in order to last more than five fucking minutes. If I’m being honest, while the social commentary does lend a nastily blunt edge to the story, I’m not actually sure what Gans is trying to say – is he alluding to racism being entrenched in French culture? Is he suggesting that country bigots are far worse than city ones? Or is he simply putting forth the notion that no matter where you run or what you do, violent prejudice is ever present? I have no clue, but it sure give the director carte blanche to make things extra messy.
It’s fair to say that Frontier(s)’ main characters are fairly thinly sketched as they each perform the basic functions of a novice group of thieves, but this is a film where you find empathy with the leads not because they’re particularly well written, but because the trauma they’re put through is so merciless, you can’t help but want them to get away. Of the youths, Karina Testa’s Yasmine is our focal point – recently bereaved of her brother, pregnant by her estranged boyfriend and now having cannibal Nazis to deal with, she puts on a trauma-based performance to rival Leonardo DiCaprio’s from The Revenant as she absorbs various blows to the face and body, has her hair cut short and is pledged to wed the stoney-faced heir of the Nazi clan. Is it a nuanced, multi-layered characters study? No, but it’s a visceral, tour-de-force of cinematic suffering that really drives home how inhumane our villains are.
Speaking of the villians – Gens may not even be trying to differentiate the Nazis from the Texas Chainsaw clan (they even have a traumatic dinner table scene), but they perform enough grotesque atrocities to square up to other pretenders and it’s here where the director truly shows his stuff.
Victims are hung up by hooks through their heels, Achilles tendons are snipped with industrial pliers and a table mounted buzz-saw is put to spectacular use as the carnage hits you like a blood-flood. But while the relentless murder and death continues unabated, Gens “happily” provides some much needed catharsis by unleashing just as much sadism upon the villains as they heaped on their victims. In fact, this may be something of a controversial take, but the movie plays the psycho family card better than the majority of actual Texas Chain Saw sequels that exist.
These day, Frontier(s) doesn’t seem anywhere near as radical as it once seemed, but it still excels as an above average slice of survival horror/torture porn whose gory excesses still manage to carry a potent wallop of a shotgun blast to the skull.
Experience a trip to the primal frontier.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 