Not unsurprisingly, the latest balls-to-the-wall, unflinchingly graphic horror film to emerge from France (following IRREVERSIBLE, INSIDE, FRONTIERES, et al) originated from its writer-director’s own deep depression, though a final dedication to Dario Argento suggests at least one other prominent influence. (Pascal’s previous film HOUSE OF VOICES played like a feature length homage to Italian horror, specifically Fulci’s THE BEYOND). The closest genre cousin to MARTYRS in cinematic genre terms is probably the unforgettable Spanish production IN A GLASS CAGE, though it makes an interesting companion piece to the (relatively) discreet Jack Ketchum adaptation THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. Making the most of the new found freedom in France to make unrestrained extreme horror pictures, Laugier explicitly shows the kind of horrors those two films largely suggested.
“Victims are all that’s left in our world…” so notes a key character at one point in this utterly harrowing movie, a movie which, however you end up feeling about it (and it is perhaps the ultimate love-it-or-hate-it horror film), undeniably boasts outstanding achievements in music (a haunting, appropriately melancholic, disarmingly lovely score by Alex and Willie Cortes to accompany the oppressive sound design), make-up effects (by Adrien Morot and the late Benoit Lestang, who committed suicide after the film’s completion) and cinematography.
During one of their uproarious sketches shown over the Frightfest weekend in London this year, Adam Green and Joe Lynch discussed horror movies that “scar“, with one of Green’s examples being the character of Zelda in Mary Lambert’s PET SEMATARY. MARTYRS has its “Zelda”…and then some. It immerses us in the most vivid cinematic Hell imaginable and refuses to give us respite. Superficially echoing one of the key tactics of THE EXORCIST, this movie makes us deeply afraid of what awaits a character when they climb a staircase. Just when you think the movie has gone as far as a film can conceivably go, it seems to go further.
MARTYRS is a movie to scar. It takes the notion of ordeal cinema to a whole new level, more so even that last year’s astonishingly harsh INSIDE. Sometimes it seems as gruelling and horrifying as you always imagined banned films to be when you couldn’t get to see them. Harrowingly authentic acting (if there are more upsettingly convincing performances on screen this year than those here by Mylene Jampanoi and Morjana Alaoui, color us stunned) and hard-to-watch effects combine to form one of the horror genre’s most punishing cinematic experiences.
Pascal Laugier presents a grim world in MARTYRS, a world where human life has become so cheap, where acts of selfish cruelty have become so routine that death is a merciful release even when nothing definite seems to lurk beyond it. (Depending on how you personally react to the movie’s ambiguous final frames, the resolution either brings a glimmer of hope or reinforces the fact that there is none to be had).
Fleeting flashbacks give an idea of the physical and psychological suffering endured by captured abuse victim Lucie (Jampanoi) as a child. Her present state offers an even more vivid picture : 15 years on, she is relentlessly taunted and persecuted by an imaginary, demonic figure representing a physical manifestation of both her emotional scars and her guilt over the fellow captive she failed to save. This nightmarish figure of fear is the creature she envisions making the cuts she inflicts upon herself…and it provides just one of the movie’s scarring visual images. Be grateful if you can get it out of your head after watching MARTYRS.
Lucie grows up with the single-minded intent of tracking down those who wrecked her life and killing them. Laugier’s film begins as a harsh, bloody revenge story as, early on, Lucie locates the average middle class family that apparently subjected her to an endless series of inhuman acts. True horror in Laugier’s world lurks within the spacious, comfortable home of people who could be your neighbors if you live on an especially well-to-do street.
Lucie blows away the parents and their two teenage kids, but this act of retribution does nothing to exorcise her demons and it proves to be one of the last things she accomplishes in her short, miserable life. What’s more, there’s another victim down in the cellar and Lucie’s long-term, loyal friend Anna (Alaoui) is herself chosen as the next subject for the family’s associates. Arriving on the scene after the massacre, these associates are an extended circle of middle class, ageing citizens on an obsessive mission to find a “martyr”, someone who, when subjected to prolonged physical torture transcends being merely a victim and, at the point of death, can communicate what the afterlife will be like. The “monsters” in MARTYRS are average-looking people for whom all that matters is a mission that will ease their fears of dying. They are among the most despicable characters to ever exist within the world of a horror movie.
Relentlessly visceral and horrifying, this movie reaches a fever pitch of terror early on only to escalate in intensity at every turn. Staggering scenes of grisly shotgun blasts, hammer-bludgeoning and self mutilation take it to a level where you become afraid of what’s next…only to discover that what’s next is the yet-more-distressing retrieval of an emaciated, barely alive additional victim from the basement, whose fate may just be one of the most extraordinarily harrowing things this reviewer has ever seen in a movie.
With Lucie mercifully dead, the movie launches into its least bloody but most sustained and contentious period of physical horror and abuse. The torment suffered by Anna will result in this movie being likened to the SAW franchise and the disparagingly regarded “torture porn” trend by the film’s detractors, but it, like the rest of MARTYRS, never comes off as exploitation. Played out in unflinching detail, in long takes, largely sans music and dialogue, Laugier presents us with a grueling destruction of beauty, an unforgettable depiction of the amount of suffering a human being can take before death finally arrives. This pretty young woman is reduced through prolonged bouts of violent abuse to an unrecognizable, battered, androgynous, barely conscious bag of bones and blood.
Seldom has suffering and despair been so potently conveyed on screen. Punishingly graphic in its depiction of brutality toward captured women (and children), MARTYRS offers a nihilistic examination of an all-too real sickness with no release for the devastated audience. Having been put through the wringer, we want so badly for those responsible for Anna’s torment to be punished with equal force and fury…but Laugier denies us this because, hey, it’s the real world – people like this exist and their acts go, sometimes, unpunished. Ending ambiguously with the suggestion of a minor victory for its crushed heroine, the film finds beauty, even optimism within its extreme darkness, though few viewers will emerge with anything resembling a positive slant on the world.
Remarkably disturbing in a jaded cinematic world where we think we’ve seen it all and also unforgettably moving, MARTYRS is a movie to haunt this and future generations. Chalk it up as another triumph for fearless French horror.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
