Martyrs, 2008.
Directed by Pascal Laugier.
Starring Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin, Robert Toupin, Patricia Tulasne, and Juliette Gosselin.
SYNOPSIS:
A quest for revenge against a family of abusers leads two young women into a nightmare of existential dread.
‘Masterpiece’ or ‘classic’ are words that get bandied around far too easily when it comes to popular culture, but every so often a piece of work arrives that fully justifies being tagged as such, and Pascal Laughier’s Martyrs is a transgressive horror masterpiece that rose from the much-maligned – and unfairly so – torture porn boom of the 2000s to stand apart from other contemporary works and show that extreme gore and violence didn’t just have to be masked strangers inserting sharpened garden implements into helpless victims to have an effect.
Not that Martyrs doesn’t contain such graphic brutality, but very rarely has such violence been justified with a plot that not only makes you think but also does not give you any solid answers for what you have just witnessed, and by the end of the movie you too are a witness – or a martyr – just as much as the main character.
That main character is Anna (Morjana Alaoui), a young woman who has gone to the house of a seemingly normal family who have just been slaughtered by Anna’s friend Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï). Lucie brutally killed the mother, father and two children because she believed they were the people who tortured and abused her in a run-down warehouse when she was a child. Lucie escaped the torture and went to live in care, which is where she met Anna, but has since been haunted by a demon who savagely attacks her, and by killing the family Lucie believes the demon will leave her alone.
This is all in the first half-hour of the movie, where it becomes quite clear that Lucie’s problems will not be solved by taking revenge on the people that tortured her 15 years before. Instead, Lucie’s predicament has drawn Anna into a nightmare scenario that will see her testing the limits of human endurance as the secrets of the family’s house are revealed and the ultimate existential questions get asked, and then possibly answered… or not.
A movie of two clear halves – the first being Lucie’s revenge and the second Anna’s discovery of who is beneath the house and why they are there – Martyrs shocked audiences when it was first released due to its graphic depictions of people being shot, sliced, severely beaten and flayed, and due to the context in which these things happen time has not weakened its impact at all; if anything, the pristine 4K restoration highlights how brilliant and realistic the effects of all this violence are, and the core idea at the centre of it all is an eternal mystery that provides a myriad of potential outcomes.
And Martyrs offers up several possibilities without claiming one is right or forcing its audience to accept any of them, but it will encourage discussion, as it has done since its initial release. This is the real triumph of the movie, because other French extremity movies such as Frontier(s), Inside and Satan may have had their social commentaries on the political upheaval happening in France at the time, but this was really just a backdrop to give the movie’s victims cause to leave the big city and become meat for the grinder in rural seclusion, away from prying eyes.
In Martyrs, religion and its effects/influence in a capitalist society is the main subject for exploration, along with testing the limits of human suffering and how childhood traumas can manifest themselves later in life, which are topics that not only the New Wave of French Extremity but torture porn as a whole never dared explore past the point of Eli Roth having rich businessmen torturing young men and women for fun in the Hostel movies. Yes, people snipping their optic nerves with scissors looked cool but there wasn’t much else going on behind the eyes, as it were.
But backing up these thought-provoking questions is some of the most brutal and tragic violence ever depicted onscreen. Brutal, because the combination of make-up effects and the quick editing that was the popular style of the time, makes you think you see a lot more than you actually do, but tragic because when Pascal Laugier’s camera lingers on the victims of the violence it chooses to highlight the emotions of the actors rather than close-ups of entrails or wounds.
The best example of this is in one of the movie’s most famous scenes, where Anna suffers her most painful torture after having been beaten unrelentingly for the previous 20 minutes, and despite the obvious nods to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, what she has waiting for her is not the work of demons or fantastical creatures but the twisted desires of human beings with the means to achieve whatever they want, regardless of the consequences. On that note, Martyrs is probably more relevant today than it was in 2008.
For its 4K UHD debut Eureka have restored Martyrs from its original camera negative, and the result is stunning, the blood, bruises and other bodily mutations retaining their original grit but with much sharper detail, the biggest difference being that you are now able to see the face of Lucie’s demon tormentor with much improved clarity. Presented in Dolby Vision and HDR10, the set also includes a standard Blu-ray disc, a 100-page book on the movie with contributions from academics including Anton Bitel and Reece Goodall, and a poster, all enclosed in a rigid slipcase featuring new artwork.
For special features there is an audio commentary provided by Abertoir Horror Film Festival co-director Nia Edwards-Behi, a video essay on Martyrs and body horror in general by author Xavier Aldana Reyes, a new interview with actor Mylène Jampanoï and an interview with French Extremity expert Alice Haylett Bryan, plus all the archive features from previous releases, including Organic Chronicles, the feature-length ‘making-of’ documentary that is definitely worth checking out if you have not done so before.
Movies so extreme, graphic and downright nasty aren’t normally labelled as ‘must see’ titles for casual or mainstream audiences, but Martyrs raises itself above the glut of torture porn shockers and Italian cannibal gut-crunchers not only by having such a thought-provoking subtext but also by being impeccably shot and, surprisingly, quite elegant in its composition, again playing into that Hellraiser theme of pain and beauty being intertwined and indivisible.
Not only one of – if not the – greatest horror movies of the 2000s, but also a horror movie that deserves to be spoken about in the same company as The Exorcist, Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Martyrs is still the gold standard of extreme horror and the benchmark by which all other contenders should be measured against for years to come. The Human Centipede 2 doesn’t even come close.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
