The trailer for Abel Ferry’s Vertige has appeared at online. You can also see it below the break. Judging from the first two thirds of the trailer, this is a picture very much in the mould of Renny Harlin’s Cliffhanger. There’s some suspenseful business up in the mountains and things don’t appear to be going too well. And then… the last part of the trailer really is a surprise. The film seems to shift genre entirely - don’t click over the break if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Here’s the trailer. What dialogue there is comes in unsubtitled French, but there’s not much of it and you’ll still enjoy the trailer without understanding a word.

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So, I take it that you saw the whole trailer and we can talk spoilers? Good.

The last third seemed to sprint off suddenly into slasher territory. The trailer plays somewhat like an above ground Descent, without the Gollums. Aside from the dodgy recutting of footage and speed-me-upm slow-me-down effects, the film actually seems like a lot of fun from what we see here. Ferry has referred to Deliverance as an influence, and while that may hold at a narrative level, the film seems miles away stylistically.

The French run of superb horror may be stalking on a while yet.

Director Abel Ferry previously directed a short called The Good, The Bad and The Zombies. I haven’t seen it, but with that title and appearances from Dominique Pinon and Lloyd Kaufman I think I’m really going to have to track a good quality copy down. Vertige screenwriter Louis-Paul Desanges also penned Mutants which gives him a pretty potent one-two of French horror this summer.

One working title for the film was High Lane and I’d expect it to likely go back to that handle or something like it when launching in the US - the literal translation of Vertige being quite definitively taken by… well, by the third greatest film in the history of cinema.

source: CinemaFantastique