Martyrs

Not to defeat my own purpose, but I'd advise against reading my thoughts about Pascal Laugier's super-horror movie Martyrs if you haven't seen it already. "I would like you to be a virgin," says Laugier in his intro to the film on the just-released DVD, and with good reason. As Bloody Disgusting puts it: "The only negative thing about Laugier's film is that once you see it, you'll never be able to see it for the first time ever again..." Really, if you don't go into this thing as ignorant as possible, you're cheating yourself, and in order to discuss this film, I have to spoil it entirely.

Also, I will fawn all over this movie and I don't want to over-hype it for those who haven't seen it, because you might end up latching onto any of the several reasons to loathe it. Laugier also says in his intro, "Feel very free to hate me. I’m not especially in love with myself, so I would understand."

But really: OH MY GOD.

According to its director, France's Martyrs "plays on the basics of horror filmmaking, on the audience’s expectations and knowledge of the genre." And though you've never seen anything like the whole of Martyrs, indeed, many of its parts are reminiscent. After a brief flashback intro, it announces itself as a revenge flick, as a young woman, Lucie, enters the home of two adults she believed kidnapped and abused her (though not sexually, it's pointedly noted) as a child. She brutally guns them down along with their children. Ironically, even after revenge is gotten, Lucie's still the sufferer. There's a twisty woman-creature straight out of J-horror who haunts Lucie, but her significance goes beyond circumstance or an incoherent VHS tape. The last third of the film has all the nastiness of torture porn, but almost inconceivably, a purpose beyond shock. The film seems determined to turn every cliche on its ear. It is gratuitous, yet, every second we see is vital to the story. The carnage runs thick and gloopy, and yet Laugier assigns purpose to every death (beyond "...because it's a horror movie"). The villains are despicable, of course, but there's a sense of accountability beyond what you normally see in this genre. I've seen people refer to Martyrs as the "holy grail" of horror cinema, and indeed, it allows two ideals to intersect that rarely do -- it's got the body count, and the brain.

Unlike virtually every horror film, even the most relentless specimens like Cannibal Holocaust (where every image feels like a pummel), Martyrs does not contain that scene, the one that sticks out and stays etched on your psyche, the one that you can point to and say, "There. That fucked me up." In Martyrs, they're all that scene. The film leaps into action via a shotgun, and for the next 90 minutes, it barely lessens its pace, as Lucie's friend, Anna, arrives at the house of Lucie's suspected one-time tormentors (and now victims) and attempts to clean up her friend's mess. Her friend is, meanwhile, literally battling her demon, a sadistic facsimile of a girl she saw as she was escaping her unjust prison 15 years earlier, but did not have time to emancipate. The haunting drives Lucie to suicide, which leads Anna to stumbling upon the truth: that this is indeed the home of Lucie's former captors, as evidenced by a secret underground prison/lab. There, Anna finds a prisoner similar to her friend, whom she attempts to clean and set free, only to lead her to the shotgun of some associates of Lucie's abusers. And then! And then! And then! Though the bad guys are clearly defined and disgusting, the real villain here seems to be the relentless plot. It's volatile, unpredictable and it hurdles you through atrocities, as though you should be so lucky to be a stone in this film's grand slingshot.

Those bad guys, it turns out, are not just out to get their rocks off by imprisoning and torturing these girls. There's more going on, much like the way Martyrs doesn't merely revel in violence. The kidnappers/experimenters are part of a network (perhaps a cult) attempting to turn their inhabitants into "martyrs" (as defined via on-screen text right before the credits roll, "martyr" here refers not necessarily to the widely accepted image of someone who self-sacrifices of a cause, but more generally, it's used to mean "witness"). Essentially, these people who do terrible things to young girls are doing so to find out what happens after death. Their goal is to push these women into an ecstatic state that comes only after the body has given up resisting its abuse. (They use girls, not because horror films are inherently sexist, but as the Mademoiselle -- the seeming matriarch of this operation -- explains to Anna before she's shackled and tortured, because young girls are more susceptible to becoming martyrs.) As questions go, you don't get more universal than, "What happens after you die?" Like many a horror fan, the collective fascination from this network reaches morbid levels.

Of course, abuse is key to getting to that point, which means we get a 15 minute sequence in which a woman force feeds Anna green slop and a man beats her. They alternate throughout the duration, as Anna's face becomes increasingly bruised and swelled. Martyrs made me mad and queasy, but here it did something a horror movie has never done: it made me sad. It's a hell of a thing to have to watch this girl get beat on, and if there is any reason to jump ship and say, "I hate this shit. No more," clearly this is it.

The Mademoiselle explains that almost all of their subjects are victims, who perish in the face of this abuse. Martyrs are a rare breed, diamonds in this roughness, who provide the rare gateway to the afterlife. It turns out that Anna, after all the blows and one skinning, is one. She shares her visions with the Mademoiselle, who then calls a meeting to seemingly preach what she just heard. As guests convene (keep in mind that they're still in the original house owned by Lucie's captors), Mademoiselle takes off her makeup and turban and false eyelashes in the bathroom upstairs, while talking to someone through the door. She says that what Anna told her proves there is indeed something after death, that her words were precise and she did not leave it open to interpretation. She asks the man she's talking to, Etienne, if he can imagine what the afterlife holds. He cannot. "Keep doubting," she tells him seconds before putting a gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger. The movie ends there.

This mysterious, open-ended finish is undoubtedly infuriating to those who like closure with their cinema. It is a much-discussed topic on the IMDb boards for Martyrs, with many weighing in their interpretations. This one is my favorite: it basically goes that via Anna's witnessing of heaven, the Mademoiselle was able to realize that she'll never experience that glory of all the atrocities she's had a hand in committing (faced with self-awareness, she becomes a witness in her own right, thus one of the titular martyrs). When she tells Etienne to "keep doubting," she's telling him to continue existing and not let the fact that all their effort has been for naught take him over, lest he and the rest of them off themselves, too.

But in the end, I don't think it truly matters that there are no solid explanations, that the one above is one of several possibilities. In fact, I think that's the point. By investing into detail -- from Lucie's ghost to why the rest of the cult storm the house to find Anna (there was a busy signal for hours when trying to reach the family) to the film's title to the reason Lucie ends up pummeling the mother who isn't as dead as she first thought (she ran out of shotgun shells) -- and by explaining so much, Laugier renders his mysteries even more profound. In the end, if we've invested in this film the way we're supposed to, we're left ravenously curious and, in fact, on equal footing with the cultists. Let's not forget that the suffering we just experienced was essentially for our benefit as viewers, just as it was for their characters. It's a statement (a wake-up call?) not unlike that which Michael Haneke attempted with Funny Games, it just has a lot less contempt for its audience.

And that, on top of its icy aesthetics and eerily natural performances, is what makes Martyrs hideously perfect. Unlike the purely visceral experience that merits the "porn" tag, Martyrs is a horror movie that demands you think about it. After years of moaning Asian ghosts and torture porn (love the latter as I often do, I know it's garbage), after all that we have suffered through as fans of the genre, there something transcendent, something divine. That something in Martyrs.

Comments

[price]

I've been dying to know what you thought of this movie. I can't stop thinking about it. I tried to watch another horror film shortly after and it seemed so pointless. Martyrs might have actually broken the ankles of the horror genre.

[spazmo]

Nice one, price! I was definitely hobbled after seeing this. As in, curl up into a twitchy, thumb-sucking ball, hobbled.

Brilliant review, Rich. I know I say that every time, but this one is seriously Pulitzer material. It's a tough film to articulate, but you nailed it for me.

In traditional horror flicks, the victims are quickly dispatched, the killer's motivations revealed, the final girl is empowered, the tables are turned, the killer is graphically neutralized, and the audience is gratified. How often in real life do people's experiences (POWs, kidnap/rape victims, etc.) follow this script? Never. True-to-life misery is random, pointless, and unimaginably interminable. It doesn't end neatly before the credit crawl.

"Martyrs" was so unflinching and true to its vision you really gotta just break down and salute it.

(Also, any plans to get Gabe involved in another Salo-stlye movie night? 'Cause that was fun.)

[Sandro]

(Also, any plans to get Gabe involved in another Salo-stlye movie night? 'Cause that was fun.)

Or sex? 'Cause that would be fun.

[Amanda]

watching now...

[Ben]

I downloaded this the moment I saw this post (I only read up until you suggested we watch first), and I just finished it not 10 minutes ago.

Up until now, my favorite horror flick has been High Tension, so I'm glad I've found a new one. I really don't even know what to say about this movie at the moment as it's still so fresh in my mind. I've never cried during a horror film before, but during the scene where she was being force fed and she let it happen without resisting after hearing Lucie's voice, some tears welled up.

I'm not really worried about not hearing what Anna said to the Mademoiselle - I feel that no director/writer/producer/anything would have been able to come up with something to satisfy the audience; no one can tackle the question of what happens after death without clear personal bias. The way it was left leaves it up to the viewer to determine what she saw, which, I believe, wasn't truly life-after-death, but a state of mind that is totally disconnected from the body and would not continue after the brain has ceased, thus meaning that Mademoiselle killed herself in vain, whether or not she did it because she felt at the time that she would never achieve what Anna saw or because she was anxious to see it herself. I believe that what Anna saw was unique for her situation; the torture forced her to detach from her surroundings. She wasn't ecstatic, she went insane.

I really wish I could put what I'm trying to say more clearly into words, but I guess I'm trying to interpret this from the point of view of someone who doesn't believe in an afterlife whatsoever. The true horror was that the cultists were seeking knowledge about something they would never know, torturing girls to the point of insanity (which in each individual case manifested itself differently; Anna hearing Lucie's voice comforting her and encouraging her led her to an 'ecstatic' state rather than Anna seeing a fellow victim or said victim seeing cockroaches leading them to self-mutilation) only to heed their words as divine knowledge. It's disturbing to think of it that way, rather than that they achieved what they were looking for.

[Ben]

Also, as the Mademoiselle said, when people are pushed to that point, they see things. Lucie saw the distorted version of the girl Anna found, and that girl saw bugs everywhere. We never got to see if Lucie's voice was coming from a vision of Lucie herself or was just an auditory hallucination (or potentially just Anna's inner thoughts and memories). So, if the Mademoiselle knew that the previous girls had been seeing things that she knew not to be actually there, merely created by the victims' minds, then how was she so readily available to accept what Anna saw as something real? Anna's personality was severely different than Lucie's, she was a nurturer, so of course she wouldn't react the same to the torture as Lucie or possibly the other girl had.

Also, I feel that Anna was more ready to accept her fate because she had technically been suffering all her life; she tended to Lucie's needs and had been the sole person with knowledge as to what Lucie went through. She knew she wasn't going to break free so she acquiesced to the beatings sooner than most. She also had just been through so much trauma, with Lucie killing the entire family and then herself. She had lost the person she loved (she tried to kiss her, remember), so what did she have to fight for anymore?

[Ben]

God, I really did get a high from this movie. I hope I'm not the only one.

[ac]

The reviews here in France for this movie were surprinsingly bad, so I am glad to read this review. I agree very much, I also thought that this film's plot was very successful for an audience used to horror films. It uses the cliché plot twists of the genre and lets us get comfortable in our understanding of them, before sending us in an opposite direction. I would argue that this is the most important quality of the film, because if it

[ac (coco)]

...(sorry) because if its point was actually to offer a discussion on after life and martyrdom, it would have started to talk about it a bit earlier in the film. To me the film was almost a love letter to horror fans.

[julie]

I too downloaded this after reading your pre-post, and I just stayed up 'til 6am to watch it.

Holy hell. So worth it.

I don't even know where to begin in analysing it, and I'm lacking in the encyclopedic film knowledge or critical skills I'd need to bring anything new to the conversation anyway.

I do want to say, however, that I was revolted to read just now that there are negotiations underway to make a US version. WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN? All the nuances of the story are invariably lost in American remakes. Please, someone help me understand.

[Ben]

An American version? Why does this always happen? I saw the Thai version of Shutter on the Sundance channel and I really liked it, then I saw a commercial for the American version two months later and I wanted to throw up. I also saw the Korean (I think it was Korean) movie 'A Tale of Two Sisters,' which I thought was really good as well, then almost a year later the commercials for 'The Uninvited' started coming out, and I thought it looked too similar, only to find out it too was a remake, causing me to want to throw up again. American horror is awful. As soon as this starts to be advertised here, I'll do my best to spread the original version among my friends like wildfire.

[Ben]

Wait, I have to edit. "MODERN American horror is awful." The Birds is still one of my favorite movies ever.

Fucking goddammit, look what i just found:

The Birds (2011)
With George Clooney, Naomi Watts.

I feel like I need to start an organization to stop these things from happening. It really makes me mad. I need to punch Naomi Watts in the face, stat.

[ihaveneverbeforeinmylifeyelledatagirllikethis]

OT but Rich are you ever going to tell us what the amazing opportunity was that required you to take some time off from blogging a while back? My money is on the idea that Vh1 has hired you to write for one of its reality shows. Am I right?? Am I right?? If that's not what happened, it totally should.

[Fred]

Okay. I downloaded this after reading the first couple of sentences here, then I watched it.

Dude.

It's basically the Passion of the Christ as a horror movie. It felt like Laugier saw V for Vendetta and wanted to make a movie off the Natalie Portman in a Dark Room parts. I LOVE horror movies and would've followed Miike off a bridge at points, but this was manipulative as hell (the movie was, I mean). I dunno, maybe I'll watch it again.

[Amanda]

Thank you for writing this because I watched it after seeing your post and that was the best movie I have ever seen. Now I feel like putting a gun in my mouth, there's never going to be another first time.

[kolimpah]

Stunning. For the first time i found myself consciously acknowledging that it was "just a movie" Though I like horror, I am squeamish enough that i was disturbed for months just from reading you review on Salo. This was a different experience. I downloaded it after reading the post intro and kept my mouse on the stop button the entire time. However, when Anna is captured, the movie really changed for me. It does an excellent job of creating an authentic sense of, well martyrdom and religious fervor and mortality. The sight of all those elderly people waiting to hear what will happen to many of them very soon was very potent. The imdb link above expresses mostly what I think of the ending, basically the horror of knowing that we can imagine exactly what happens after death.

Also, in response to the condemnation of remakes, generally they are disappointing, but I feel that The Ring was a much more effective and interesting film than Ringu.

Anyways, thanks for telling me about this movie.

[Dodger]

thanks for the recomendation, agree with all that you said. crazy film.
and like all good threads on imdb, they get deleted.

[julie]

It's been almost a week since I saw it (and commented above) and I'm still thinking about Martyrs now and then. What makes it NOT "torture porn" is the motivation of the people conducting the experiments.

In fact, I've seen so many reviews dismiss it as "torture porn" that I can only surmise that they're either very lazy reviewers who base their opinions on the reviews of others, or they didn't actually watch the entire film.

(I don't hate modern American horror in its entirety, I just think it's arrogant to think you can re-make a film better than its creators already did. And it offends me on some level that Americans need (?) a film to be American and feature Hollywood stars to relate/appreciate/understand it.)

[Heather]

I just watched this last night. My interpretation of the ending was this: Since there was no talk of Heaven or Hell, simply "life after death", I think the Madame killed herself after hearing what Anna said because it was something blissful and the Madame was eager to experience it. The reason why she didn't tell everyone what Anna had said was because there would be a possibility of mass suicides.

[RockitQueen]

I watched this last night when I saw you had posted about it and, like kolimpah, I had to keep reminding myself it was just a movie. It was so difficult to watch but I couldn't look away. The acting was superb and the story was outstanding...unlike any horror film I've ever seen. I still haven't fully processed it, but just wanted to thank you for your very insightful review and I thought your assessment of the ending was really interesting.

[coco]

an american remake with a bigger budget could offer a better made skinning. I thought it looked very fake and it kind of brought down my scare level. As far as I can tell it's the only thing that is worth remaking.

[x]

Like other commenters here, I downloaded this movie after reading the first few sentences of the review. I finally got time to watch it and I am speechless. Everything you say in this review is spot on.

I was peeking through my fingers through the first half. The ghoul lady scared the shit out of me, and the rest of it was amazing. The acting was great. I loved the kiss in the bathroom scene.
I don't watch horror anymore but I was compelled to watch this one. Uggghhh god I'm gonna be up all night now. Fuck.

[curtis]

i thought this movie was BOGUS. not scary, not at all. i feel like they tried to jam three movies into one.

[Alexa]

I almost hate that I had to read your whole post to decide that I wanted to see this - and still it sat in the Netflix envelope for two months. I'm bad with horror movies, even though I'm obsessed with the genre, I needed to be sure it was worth seeing. It totally was. It says a lot that even though I knew the whole story already I was still scared shitless and completely blown away. And even though I slept horribly the night after, I'm glad I saw it, I don't think any other horror film can beat it.

And as for the talk of an American remake - I'm not always entirely against remakes of foreign films. Europe and Asia are usually the ones with the good ideas, America has the budget to make them look good, that sounds like a good marriage to me. But when it comes to films like, hell no. American filmmakers don't have the ability to make a film with this level of violence without turning it into torture porn.

[Cfsxlzlk]

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