Review: Martyrs (2007)

MARTYRS (2007)
Director: Pascal Laugier
Cast: Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin, Robert Toupin, Patricia Tulasne, Juliette Gosselin, Xavier Dolan-Tadros, Emilie Miskdjian, Isabelle Chasse
Studio: GeniusProducts.com

McBeardo McNugget: Just as Italy defined extreme horror filmmaking in the 1980s, today it’s France pushing all fright movie limits, and Martyrs may be its coupe de gross. Relentlessly unpleasant but lingeringly thought-provoking, Martyrs’ shocks ultimately reveal a profound meditation on metaphysical violence and the nature of human sacrifice – without cheapening the suffering of the human being sacrificed. So ambitious a melding of high-art concepts and grindhouse histrionics has rarely hurt so effectively.

SYNOPSIS: (Spoiler Alert!)
Battered young Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) escapes from horrific captivity. She is hospitalized and raised in an institution where she befriends fellow abuse victim Anna (Morjana Alaoui).

Fifteen years later, with Anna’s help, Lucie executes what seems to be a charming suburban family, claiming that the parents were her captors. Following the murders, Lucie remains tormented by a scarred, monstrous creature (Isabelle Chasse).

After Lucie nearly tears herself to literal pieces, Anna discovers a torture chamber beneath the dead family’s home, coming across Emilie Miskdjian as La Suppliciée (French for “torture victim “) wearing a chastity belt and a metal mask nailed into her scalp.

Lucie and the other victim are shot to death by a squadron of some sort, and the truth is revealed to Anna by Mademoiselle (Catherine Bégin). The older woman heads up a cult that seeks to learn what lies beyond death by physically punishing an individual’s body until her mind achieves the ecstatic grace state of Joan of Arc and other martyrs.

Mademoiselle notes that the best subjects for this work are young women, which does not bode well for Anna.

Anna is then subjected to repulsively violent (although, curiously, never sexual) agonies. One beating to her face plays out on-screen for 15 uninterrupted minutes. Eventually, Anna gets skinned alive, and slips into the martyr state, whispering to Mademoiselle what happens after life.

Cult members gather to celebrate the creation of a new martyr. Mademoiselle seems to be getting ready to join them but, armed with the answer to humanity’s greatest question, she puts a pistol in her mouth and pulls the trigger.

McBLOVIATION: (Spoiler Alert!)
Upon first viewing, I loathed Martyrs.

It seemed empty and cold and as calculated to shock as generic Troma product. In particular, the quarter-hour of kisser-punching prompted me to think, “Okay, we get it!”, and I hate being forced to hear Internet clichés, in my head or anywhere else.

Technically, the movie is flawless. I certainly had to credit its convergence of spot-on filmmaking, performances, art direction, special effects, etc.

Nonetheless, Martyrs’ genre-melding of female shotgun revenge, screaming-mimi J-horror spookery, and the ever-steeper, ever more plasma-sopped slope of modern torture porn came off as gimmicky and devoid of substantive point or even worthwhile diversion.

But then Martyrs stuck with me.

France’s previous cookie-toss champion, the Beatrice Dalle pregnancy freak-out Inside (2007), rattled me right away, almost becoming the first film to actually make me throw up (the puke bubbled hot and ready to launch, right at the top of my throat).

Martyrs is a different experience on each of its many levels, which is not to suggest that Inside is a mere thrill-ride. But if the latter movie feels like what happens when you are chased by a hell-bent (human) monster, the former conveys what it must feel like after you’ve been caught.

It’s no fun at all. Not for one second.

But Martyrs, for sure, is deep and perhaps I am not (always), so it took a few days for me to recognize the power of its imagery and implications. It began as I pondered the explicit lack of sexuality in Martyrs’ abominations - an obvious anomaly in the realm of teen-damsels-in-all-kinds-of-distress cinema.

Early on, the police point out that Lucie was not raped. Later, we assume that Lucie and Anna are lovers, and La Suppliciée is rather pointedly weighed down by a chastity belt.

Ah! These are, and must be, virgin sacrifices.

When Mademoiselle explains to Anna that the cult attempted to create martyrs of men and children, only to find that young women proved the best subjects, it evokes Jepthath in the Bible and countless other sacrifice practices, mythological and otherwise, in which the aim is to kill a natural portal of life itself – a ripely post-pubescent female – in hope of bringing about some larger fertility (abundant crops, for example).

Thus, I deduced that Martyrs was not simply exploitation, but high-art meditation in exploitation garb, loaded with subtext and allusions, reaching back through the centuries to the original horror stories that first kept conscious humans sane.

The spiritual and sociological concepts in which Martyrs traffics are the great mysteries of existence itself, as summed up by the cult’s singular ambition and, impressively, by the viewer’s ordeal of making it to the last scene.

“Why am I watching this?” translates as “Why are we here? Why do we put up with the sufferings, great and small, of being alive? What is the point?”

Heady stuff, to be sure. Magnificently, terribly so.

Browse Timeline

• « The (Rob) Zombie Conundrum
• » Black Devil Doll: The Movie THE MAN Doesn’t Want You to See … REALLY!

Comments ( 14 )

Add a Comment