Martyrs Tortures Audience Along With Characters

Martyrs by Demon

Martyrs Movie If the torture genre is dead, someone forgot to tell the French. Martyrs, a relentlessly brutal yet undeniably well crafted and terrifying piece of shock cinema has clawed its way out of the abattoir and onto DVD.

You know you are in for a nasty ride when the director issues an apology before the film. The DVD begins with helmsman Pascal Laugier inviting us to hate the movie and him along with it. “I don’t care because I don’t like myself very much either,” he explains.

Despite Laugier’s apparent feelings of antipathy towards himself, he has managed to create something transcendent in a subgenre that should have been dead years ago and hopefully can now be dumped into a pit and covered with lime. If anyone in the film world is still working to expand the canon of torture porn, he (women don’t make these movies, do they?) should be immediately tied to a chair and have his brains cut out with a Stryker Saw. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine someone doing a better or more brutal job with these elements than Laugier does at this stage in the game.

And the brutality in this movie is no joke. Martyrs eschews the dark humor and self-reflexivity that helps mellow the violence in American counterparts like Hostel and The Devil’s Rejects, maintaining a consistently grim and agonizing tone throughout. The movie also denies the audience the satisfaction of seeing justice properly served to the bad guys at the conclusion, a trait common to this subgenre (Hostel ends with a teenager taking revenge on his tormentors, and Rejects with the killers going out in a blaze of gunfire). Martyrs, on the other hand, concludes in a deliberately ambiguous fashion, with one of the killers taking her own life for reasons never quite made explicit, and with the hero’s fate cerebral and grim. It’s an art house ending in a horror movie. Viva la France!

The movie is so rough on the audience that one wonders if the viewer isn’t being cultivated for martyrdom along with the film’s young victims. In fact, since the film’s release, many viewers seem to be treating Martyrs like a rite of passage – a gauntlet that separates the PG-13 crowd from the true disciples of the dark arts. In Martyrs, what starts off as merely ultraviolent becomes almost unbearable by film’s end. I found myself wanting to fast forward through the movie’s final challenge, the now infamous 20 minute torture segment in which the young heroine (who we’ve grown to adore) is literally beaten into submission by her abusive captors.

I felt about Martyrs the same way I did about Borderlands, a remarkable crime/horror movie also set in a world of torture, cults, and transcendence; namely, that the extended torture segments in the picture actually serve to undermine an otherwise brilliant movie. This is because the horror genre, at its best, is about creating pleasure more than pain. There is a reason why on a Friday night when you want to be “horrified” you rent a narrative horror movie instead of a documentary on the Holocaust.

Make of that what you will, and make of Martyrs what you want to as well – perhaps your threshold for watching pain is higher than mine and you’ll find great pleasure in this screaming, bleeding, gnashing beast of a movie. Martyrs certainly has its share of brilliance, but to experience it you too will have to be tortured.