Film Review - Martyrs
Image courtesy of Fantastic Film Festival.
Considered the zenith of New French Extremity, Pascal Laugier's Martyrs somewhat bridges the gap with the torture porn craze going on in the US at the time. Released in 2008, the infamously disturbing film follows Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) and Anna (Morjana Alaoui) as they seek revenge on the people who tortured and kept Lucie captive when she was a young girl.
After a brief introduction, the film erupts into a starkly violent home invasion, as Lucie shotguns individual members of the Belfond family, whom she insists are the ones who kept her imprisoned years ago. Without much in the way of context to who these people are and considering the seemingly normal upper middle class setting, it's easy to sympathise with Anna's doubt over whether the Belfonds had anything to do with Lucie's past, especially when Lucie shows so many signs of post-traumatic stress and guilt, physically manifesting as a phantom-like woman in her visions. Unluckily for Anna, Lucie turns out to be correct, as Anna learns she must fight for her life to escape the clutches of a torture cabal that goes beyond the Belfonds, who will stop at nothing to find out what awaits in the afterlife.
While this motivation for the antagonists is potent for explorations on the trope of women suffering throughout horror (the group capture women and then torture them to the point where they’re as close as possible to death, a process that has mostly resulted in "victims" who succumb to the pain), Laugier doesn't develop the concept enough, and as a result, the film is (despite what I believed when I first watched it over a decade ago) less of a commentary on said trope and more of just doing the thing. Yet still, the idea of the torture being some kind of existential experiment pushes Martyrs head and shoulders above most of its ilk. Gore in general is often shocking on its own, and seeing others go through prolonged periods of pain does tend to evoke a sympathetic reaction, but that extra narrative kick pushes it over the edge into what I'd consider actual terror.
Though I may be coming off a tad harsh when it comes to Laugier's approach considering the film has such a classic status, the reality is that, as much as I can commend Martyrs’ ballsiness to go for broke on the brutality, it's quite uneven in its execution (who would've thought a film this violent could also be so boring at times) - and to top it off, Laugier is a wretch of a director. For those unfamiliar, during the filming of his 2018 film Ghostland (also known as Incident in a Ghostland), he commanded an actress to keep pounding on a glass window, demanding that she pound harder, take after take, until the window broke and she suffered an awful facial injury which resulted in permanent scarring. Given that this is apparently just one example of him being a prick to work with, and judging by the quality of his films since, I can't help but write him off as a hack.
To that end, it pains me to say, but I do consider Martyrs to be a must-see film for horror fans. If you want to test your limits, but also do so in service of a film that - unlike the tactless American remake and many other films that aim squarely for "beyond messed up" status - does have some interesting ideas and a genuinely chilling ending to boot, Martyrs is up there as a formative film of its time period. Just don’t dive deeper into its writer-director’s filmography looking for a similar level of quality.
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Martyrs was presented by Fantastic Film Festival at Lido Cinema for one night only, Friday 2nd September.