Frontier(s)

Frontier(s) (French: Frontière(s)) is a 2007 French-Swiss independent horror film written and directed by Xavier Gens in his feature length debut and stars Karina Testa, Aurélien Wiik, Estelle Lefébure, and Samuel Le Bihan.

It follows a group of young criminals from Paris who lodge at a countryside inn run by neo-Nazis in the aftermath of riots spurred by a controversial presidential election.

Hoping to escape Paris but needing cash, a street gang made up of Muslim Arab youths; Alex, Tom, Farid, the pregnant Yasmine, and her brother Sami take advantage of the chaos to pull off a robbery.

When the captors discover Yasmine's escape, the family patriarch, von Geisler, cuts Alex's Achilles tendons.

Yasmine searches for car keys to escape but is ambushed by Gilberte and Klaudia bearing sub-machine guns.

On the road, one hears on the radio that the far-right candidate in the election has won the second round, thus becoming the new French President.

The real surprise here is that this creepy, contemporary gross-out also has some ideas, visual and otherwise, wedged among its sanguineous drips, swaying meat hooks and whirring table saw.

"[6] Writing for The Village Voice, Jim Ridley noted: "Ah, the triumph of globalization: Give the French a taste of neo-fascism, race riots, and paramilitary crackdowns, and they seek solace in the American cinema’s current favorite pastime—vigorously art-directed torture porn.

"[7] John Anderson of Variety compared the film to Hostel (2005) and Saw (2004), adding: "Frontier(s) is a 100-minute hemorrhage that doesn't bring anything to the operating table of torture-porn but more gore, cruelty and misery.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Perhaps slapdash with its aspirations toward message-making, this ultra-gory horror flick nonetheless delivers the bloody goods".

[13] Alexandra West notes that Frontier(s) is "about the evolution of the extreme right in France," and that it explores the "untended elements of society, the sections which are allowed to remain in realities that no longer exist in urban settings.

Frontier(s)' s crew at Fantastic'Arts 2008 festival