Frontier(s)(2007) – Far From Subtle, But Packs A Punch Where It Counts (Review)

The explosion of extremity in French genre films from the noughties was a force to be reckoned with. Essentially redefining what on-screen nastiness was, such sights hadn’t been seen since the heyday of Lucio Fulci. Filmmakers like Gaspar Noé (Irreversible) and Alexandre Aja (Switchblade Romance) have evolved out of this movement to bigger and weirder things, while others like Pascal Laugier (Martyrs) and directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury (Inside) have kept hacking away at the same vein since the very beginning. Xavier Gens has carved a more interesting path, going big with a video-game adaptation early on in his career (Hitman) before zigzagging between British television (a number of Gangs of London episodes) and broad Netflix comedy (the Hangover-lite Budapest). His roots, however, lie firmly in the annals of New French Extremity, with his directorial debut Frontier(s) still sitting near the top of the pile of butchered corpses as one of the movement’s most unpleasant texts. 

The sad sorry story begins in the mean streets of Paris, following a gang of young Muslim thieves navigating the burning city in the wake of a new fascist president rising to power. One of their group (Sami, played in full pained Mr Orange-mode by Adel Bencherif) has taken a bullet from the pursuing police, and he’s dead-weight for the majority of the crew who just want to take the money and run. His sister Yasmine (Karina Testa) does her best to stay by his side, only adding to her current stresses of an unwanted pregnancy from her ex-boyfriend/fellow robber Alex (Aurélien Wiik). But it’s soon time to scram, and the splintered unit end up lying low at a grotty inn near the French-Swiss border. Their hosts are strangely hospitable in their own sleazy way; the receptionist (Amélie Daure) and landlady (Estelle Lefébure, giving the film’s standout performance) are available for a very intimate type of room service, and their guests are obliged to sit down for a family dinner of a seriously rare meat stew that would no doubt be atop of Hannibal Lecter’s specials menu. Thus begins a brutal game of cat-and-mouse where our anti-heroes must scurry through dank caves, repulsive meat lockers and hideous pig pens to avoid being eaten… or worse.

Frontier(s) is a film so packed to the gills with situational context that it was difficult to slip in the synopsis that the villains are also full-blown Nazis. Its pool of references is vast, mainly centring around The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but also paying homage to Nazisploitation works like Marathon Man; it’s easy to imagine ageing war criminal head honcho Von Giesler (Jean-Pierre Jorris, imperiously hissing every line) taking similar sadistic glee to Laurence Olivier’s Szell in using dental equipment to inflict pain rather than his bolt cutters of choice. But as a French film about post-war, multicultural identity, it takes significant swings to be held in the same regard as La Haine, Matthieu Kassovitz’s incendiary drama about a diverse trio of youths dealing with prejudice and oppression in the projects of Paris. Frontier(s) is a tale that could have been told many years before and many years after 2007, as its politically-fraught backdrop feels both alarmingly prescient and depressingly timely. Whether it needs the extra political context of its opening movement is up for debate, since the situation of Muslim teens being cannibalised by the undying demons behind the Holocaust is potent enough as a horror concept to have serious teeth. Admittedly, moving the drama from the city to the country and finding no real change to the disgusting amount of racism and discrimination is a smart contextual move, adding a solid layer of inescapability to the problem at the heart of the film. On the flipside, the film’s need to frequently underline its politics (one character exclaims “France is the US ten years ago. We’ve got our George Bush now!”) does unfortunately pad out its already-overlong running time, turning what should be a tight 80 minute sprint from insult to injury to a terminal end into a 108 minute lecture that’s keen to describe the pain to you instead of just dealing it out. 

Gotta give it to Frontier(s) though: there is a tremendous amount of pain in it. From Achilles’ tendons being snipped to unsuspecting victims being steamed alive to a litany of ripping shotgun blasts, anyone wanting to expand their New Extremity horizons will find some genuine squirm-in-your-seat moments throughout. But when measured against the philosophical abyss of Martyrs or the controlled cruelty of Inside, it doesn’t hold the same stopping power, leaving its wall-to-wall savagery as just a bit numbing after a while. It does smartly expand its cast as time goes by, introducing more and more strange characters to its rogues’ gallery of cannibals that change up the dynamics between villains and victims as the layers of its labyrinthine underground setting are peeled back. The body count stacks up in the home stretch that proves to be the film’s most visceral sequence (including a cracking exploding head and a buzzsaw kill for the ages), and even though its final image feels like a misplaced Night of the Living Dead reference, Gens nonetheless manages to build to an impressively vicious climax after a sputtery, stop-start two acts that struggle to hit its stride.

Second Sight have assembled a well-rounded re-release package that will no doubt hit a home-video market with some increased socio-political impact. The age of Trump and the more explicit rise of fascism in the past decade or so has made Frontier(s) sadly more relatable in 2023, so this new set is a worthwhile addition to Second Sight’s solid range of New French Extremity pictures (other highlights still available to purchase are Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge). Unfortunately, the restoration itself hits something of a brick wall, with the shaky, scrappy faux-digital camerawork and the muddy colour palette actively working against standard picture quality. Gens’ visual approach resembles if Tony Scott directed a Slipknot video, rapidly cut to within an inch of its life and switching to high shutter speeds whenever the violence ramps up; it’s exhausting, sometimes working against the film’s intensity by rendering it not just hard to watch, but hard to actually see. Nevertheless, the bonus features are meaty and insightful, including an engaging commentary from Our Bloody Obsession hosts Zoë Rose Smith and Kelly Gredner, a frank and reflective interview from Gens himself and two chats with the actors who gave the most to the film (Karina Testa and Maud Forget). It’s always enthusing to see such invested conversations happening from artists and critics alike, and Second Sight always deliver on that front.

Frontier(s)‘ gruelling marathon of racially-charged hatred holds its own in the New French Extremity canon, maybe not quite seeing Gens reach the sickening heights of some of his filmmaking brethren like Laugier or Aja got to, but still announcing himself with an ambitious political focus and a commitment to bloody spectacle. Not knowing when to stop is sometimes better than stopping too soon, and Frontier(s) is definitely the former; its brutalising worldview and dogged dedication to making a social horror has given it legs 16 years after its initial release. It may not be even slightly subtle, but it still packs a punch where it counts.

Simon’s Archive – Frontier(s)