User Reviews

It seems like every year you get a new french movie that the horror community talks anxious about mainly because of its boundary breaking shocks. After last years direct hit to the head "A l'interior" and the to me rather weak "Frontieres" this year its "Martyrs" which is supposed to raise the bar another bit and i start to wonder what makes the french go that berserk and over the top lately.

Forsure "Martyrs" is different and delivers some memorable scenes punched in your memory, so it sure is another sign of Euro-Horror taking the top. The movie starts of with a child fleeing its prison and running frightened from years of abuse into freedom. Lucie is picked up, her prison is found but she doesn't talk about what happened and her torturers are never found. This is where the first part of the movie starts which is kind of divided into sub-plots. Lucie is shown growing up in a foster home, making friends with Anna, another foster child. Lucie doesn't talk to anyone about what happened, she is haunted by fears, sees demons and only seems to connect to Anna. The second part is a harsh time jump to 15 Years later. A seemingly happy family is having a Saturday breakfast the door rings and Lucie takes them out with a shotgun. She has identified her torturers from a newspaper photo and came for revenge and closure, When cleaning up the mess with Anna Lucie sees a demon like girl following her through the house and cutting her with a knife. After some creepy ghost scares it turns out its just her imagination of girl she left behind when fleeing as a child. Anna doesn't seem to believe all the story Lucie told her because we soon see the cuttings are self inflicted and only Lucie sees the girl as a manifestation of her schizophrenia which ends in her finally slicing her own throat. Part Three begins where Anna is left alone in the house with her dead friend not sure what happened and how to handle the situation. By a pretty stupid turn of events she finds a secret door to an underground dungeon and it soon becomes evident that Lucies depictions of her torture were true. Anna searches through the dungeons and soon finds the girl Lucie left behind shackled and blindfolded. She tries to help her and remove the blindfold which is bolted to her head but the girl like Lucie soon tries to kill herself. Part Four and the finale begins, so there is some majors spoilers ahead... The girl runs wild through the house and is suddenly shot by a group of strangers who reveal the story: Asick religious group believes that a suffering person can see beyond death in their final stage of martyrdom and reveal the secrets to life and death. Now Anna relives what Lucie suffered and is brought to the dungeon. From here on a seemingly endless part shows her being fed, being beaten, having her hair shaved and all this in an endless repetition until she breaks apart. This is not gory, rather unpleasant in its repetitive inhumanity. To make a long story short... Anna falls apart, talking to her dead friend Julie who tells her to give herself up to stop the suffering and when she does the final stage awaits in which Anna is skinned until she finally enters Martyrdom depicted as a trip hallucinogenic "light at the end of the tunnel" sequence. She whispers her experience into the old lady's ear and the sick cult soon gathers to witness its Martyr and the old ladies testimony. Unfortunately we never hear it, but can rather imagine when the old lady puts a gun in her mouth. The End.

I am very ambivalent with this movie... It is a nice mixture of a drama (especially the childhood part and Lucies suicide) with classic horror/ghost scare and shock elements and big load of "torture porn" thrown in at the end blended in with some religious and metaphysical hints. Anna becomes a kind of Jesus Christ and the image of a skinned girl looking to heaven sure is a logical step in depicting a person in total suffering equal to the crucifixion and to my understanding equally sick just visually more direct.

The four parts are all told in a very different style ... its like drama, ghost-horror, a little dungeon exploring and darkness, some superficial explaining, torture and some more drama. Martyrs sure is an interesting movie but it has some pretty stretched passage. If people leave the cinema its because they can't take another five minutes of seeing a girl beaten either because its unsettling or just plain idiotic and voyeuristic. I sure get the meaning in showing Anna fall apart but I think this and the skinning which is not even shown is what people are shocked about. The interweaving of the movie parts was kind of forced which put me off. Why the hell do they stay in the house, how could the children of the family not know about a high tech torture dungeon under their living room (or did they?), why does Anna find the dungeon and go in there on her own and if the cult is so eager to find the answer why is there just one girl although the dungeon looks like an industrial complex and what about that cult anyway?!

Its hard to compare the movie to anything else. Most comparisons are about the movies being all french, seeking for new boundaries and the main characters being girls. But they are all different and where "A l'interior" mixes Thriller- and Splatter-Elements "Martyrs" rather mixes Horror- and Drama-Elements... maybe the tear squeezing mixing with horror scares is what shocks people. Strange thing is... to me the scenes of Lucie fleeing as a child was one of the most shocking and I even knew them from the trailer.

I attended the Midnight Madness screening of Martyrs at the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

The first hour and a bit of Martyrs was quite effective in delivering unsettling imagery and sounds. Elements of child abuse is something that is certainly unnerving so it's subtext in the film added to the creepiness factor. the gore had it's place; it wasn't presented just for the sake of gore in of itself. Special makeup effects artist Benoît Lestang who passed away several weeks ago (as noted by director Pascal Laugier during the Q/A session after the screening) did a remarkable job to showing the brutal effects of violent physical injuries. The audience reaction is typical MM stuff: audible gasps, rolls of nervous laughter, loud and appreciative applause to truly gruesome scenes and other good stuff.

The last thirty minutes of the film held the audience in almost complete silence. The lack of any crowd reaction, aside from the revelation of what happened to Anna in her final stage, was due to the harrowing endurance test they and Anna (played by Morjana Alaoui) went through. The film turned from a highly engaging gore flick into a sad and rather depressing reflection of human suffering.

I had a strong reaction to the film that lead me to appreciate it on its dramatic and production levels. The filmmakers and actresses obviously had a lot of trust among themselves to deliver this film. after the screening Pascal Laugier, Morjana Alaoui and Mylène Jamanoï went up onstage to answer questions from MM programme director Colin Geddes and several members of the audience. Pascal fielded most of the questions while Morjana and Mylène nervously chimed in with their responses (mainly because neither of them speak English natively nor are they accustomed being infront of such a massive crowd of people). The Q/A session did get a bit awkward because some killjoy decided to challenge Pascal on why he made Martyrs. As to the context in which Martyrs was first conceived, Pascal mentioned he is going through deeply personal issues which (unsurprisingly) translated themselves, quite graphically, into Martyrs.

I'm pretty sure Martyrs is too intense for the general public so don't expect a wide theatrical release of the film. I could go on much further but that would necessitate revealing plot points and specific scenes.

French horror has been pushing the boundaries for some time now. First there was Haute Tension, then A l'Intérieur and newest in line is Martyrs, hyped up to take it all a little further. And it did, it definitely did. It's just that it doesn't belong in the same list as the films mentioned before. Martyrs goes way beyond.

Those expecting another fun, bloody, gory, insane horror flick can just up and leave, because Martyrs isn't like that. While it borrows the horror from films like A l'Intérieur and Haute Tension, the tone and effect of the film is much closer to Irréversible or better yet, Grandrieux's La Vie Nouvelle.

All these films belong to the French Extreme wave, a rather broad line of films of different backgrounds and themes, but all bearing an unrelentless level of extremity. And Martyrs stands proudly at the top of that list, even though Laugier himself seems a little hesitant to claim all credits for his film.

Martyrs starts off like you'd expect a bleak, raw and pitch black horror flick to start off. Only minutes into the film, bodies start flying and guts is spilled royally. Strangely though, there's no joy, limbs are flying enjoyment to be found. The presentation is cold, the characters are emotionally wrangled, the tension is harsh. Lucie, the main characters and victim of a year long torture plan, evokes the sympathy of the viewer and plays it out incredibly well.

The first half of the film keeps balancing on borderline horror, keeping its crude and dark exterior, but never crossing any boundaries. A Grudge-like ghost in added to the film, but Laugier stays close to the drama and never allows the film to become a mere horror flick. Things take a turn for the worse around halfway through, where the torture theme of the film is given even more power as Anna, Lucie's guardian, discovers the truth about the torture/kidnap story of the past.

From that moment on, the film becomes really uncomfortable to watch and crosses over to the realm of Noé and Grandrieux. We are witness of cold and painful torture scenes, driven to very unpleasant extremes nearing the end. The film follows the methods of the people who torture, which are based on repetition and endurance, making it all the harder to sit through.

In a rather surprising move, this film was released in theaters in Belgium by one of the most prestigious labels here, the reason for that is laid bare in the second half of the film. Rather that simply serve a story of horror and torture, Laugier digs deeper into the human mind. The idea behind Martyrs is not futile nor easily forgotten. There's a whole point to the film, elevating is above all its reference points (Saw and Hostel - sadly enough).

Martyrs is in a whole different league and is everything a film like Funny Games should have been. A definite assault to the gut, extremely graphic and to the point, without ever flinching or resolving to silly tricks to get a point across. It's a film only a director with love for the genre could make (remember that Mr Haneke, after two pointless attempts) and Laugier doesn't let down.

Visually, the film is well shot, though nothing out of the ordinary. The make-up on the other hand deserves some praise, same as the leading ladies who play their parts with conviction and depth (at one point Anna even shows a creepy resemblance to Falconetti in Jeanne d'Arc) . Essential to the film and certainly not an easy task.

Don't watch Martyrs to get a little horror kick, or to indulge in silly gorefests. This film will not deliver the fun thrills of regular horror movies, on the contrary. It's a bleak, depressive but all the more impressive look in the darker depths of the human condition, it will leave you cringing in your seat and it will make you want to look away. And it does so without ever numbing you down.

One of the most impressive films I've seen this year, a definite favorite and one that'll receive my further support through a DVD purchase, though I have no idea when or if I'll watch it again. Laugier uses every bit of skill he has to make Martyrs as painful as possible, and reaches further than any other has. A very solid 4.5*/5.0*, though no recommendation from my side. Definitely not a film for everyone.

I watched this movie, because I enjoyed the director's "Tall Man". Someone reviewing that film mentioned this one, saying, that it contained social comment, as did "Tall Man". The first part of this movie seemed gritty and quite realistic, and I could empathize with the characters, who were abused children. The second part of the movie (it has three distinct parts) begins with a shocking scene, which I felt totally morally bankrupted the film, as the abused girl kills children, the children of her abusers. Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time believing someone tortured as a child and still in great pain from it, would coldly murder other children. In any case, this second section is more standard "horror movie" fare, and I lost my empathy for the main character, as an abused child. The second main character alone survives until the third section. Here she is accosted and tortured graphically for a long period of time. At this point, as I did with "Funny Games", I'm asking myself, "Why are the film-makers showing me this?" I am not entertained by watching people suffer, unless there is some redeeming, meaningful reason for showing this. Unfortunately, I could not find one here. A gang of insane, old, rich, white people babbling some quasi-metaphysical nonsense AIN'T a reason. Crazy people will commit any manner of atrocity, but it won't make any sense and I don't need to watch it. Thank God, this director got a little more realistic for his next feature. If you want to show children being tortured, you better have a hell of a good reason for it. The last two thirds of this film just left me empty. Amazingly, I didn't even feel for the girl, who gets tortured in the last third. That's how meaningless this scene was. I saw a reason why Hanaeke was showing me pain in "Funny Games" (that I, as an audience member was a voyeur) and Noe's "Irreversible", showed me the truly sickening nature of real, out-of-control violence. I felt the violence in those films was justified. Here, I could find no justification.

What an experience. I'm a big horror fan and am happy watching and enjoying 'popcorn' slasher movies for what they are but really the genre is crying out for more pictures that truly assault the senses.

The French are particularly adept at painting bleak, unforgiving landscapes as well as thrusting you right into the action but rarely have I experienced anything quite so memorable as Martyrs.

Comparisons will (and have) been drawn with Hostel, Saw, Hellraiser and others but this is really rather misleading. Further comparisons have been drawn with Inside, Frontiers, Funny Games etc. and while slightly more credible in that atmosphere and psychology play a far greater part, none come close to Martyrs.

I'd challenge anyone not to be affected by this movie. It's gory, but you won't laugh. It's shocking, but you won't be able to look away. 24 hours later it's still running through my mind and if I see a better horror movie than this this year, I'll be truly amazed.

As much as I'd love to write more this is most certainly a film you should watch knowing as little as possible. Suffice to say the acting, cinematography, score, atmosphere and unbridled tension combine to create one of the most engaging films in this genre of the last two decades.

Watch it. Recommend it (it won't be easy) and let's hope Martyrs gets the credit it deserves.

I think the best way to watch Martyrs is to go into the movie cold. I purposely avoided any reviews that appeared to contain spoilers and read very little about the film before viewing it. Say what you will about the movie, but it takes several truly wild plot turns and part of what I enjoyed about the film is the unpredictability. In the end though, I felt like the narrative was disjointed, the themes weren't fully fleshed out, and ultimately the ideas behind Martyrs struck me as the armature on which to support several scenes of cartoon horror violence followed by sadistic torture.

On the plus side, the movie is extremely stylish and I thought the gore effects were very good. There are several familiar elements in the film but they're combined in such a disjointed way that it never becomes stale. Martyrs is certainly one of the more original horror films I've seen in recent years. The direction and acting were excellent for this kind of movie. Even though I felt manipulated at the end of the movie I couldn't help but find the last 15 minutes or so to be strangely moving. I'll never want to watch this movie again but I haven't stopped thinking about it since viewing it last week.

Now, the bad part: Martyrs really does feel like two different films that both go on for too long and don't mesh together tonally. The first half of the film at first seems to have a supernatural element and the violence is cartoonish and somewhat over-the-top. After the initial shooting though, I thought the film stopped dead in its tracks for a good 10-15 minutes while we watch Marie wailing around and cutting herself. This got a bit dull.

The second half of the film is potentially more interesting but far less entertaining. The cult shows up and Anna is imprisoned and tortured. Watching a seemingly typical nuclear family get blasted across the room by a shotgun is fun. Watching a woman forced to sit in her own waste, take periodic beatings to the face, and have her skin surgically removed, isn't "fun." The torture scenes went on for too long and way too grim and distasteful to be enjoyable.

I'm not a prude. I loved (and own) High Tension, Sheitan, Frontier(s), Inside, The Ordeal, etc. I've seen and enjoyed a lot of movies with some seriously rough content. I just personally think a horror film either needs to be harmless escapism OR, if the idea is to strike a realistic tone, the ideas supporting the film need to somewhat justify the graphic violence on-screen.

For this viewer, Martyrs missed the mark. Maybe it's because the Madmoiselle only appears on screen for a few brief scenes, but the cult aspects of the film didn't come across to me at all, so I had a hard time reading this movie as a critique on religious cultism. Martyrs actually seemed to justify their world-view, since the film clearly implies that Anna DID have a vision and one of her tormentors treats her with compassion near the end, which suggests to me that they're not pure evil and somewhat justified what they were doing to the poor girl.

Really, it just seemed to me that Martyrs was banking on scenes of young, attractive women in agony and all the religious mumbo-jumbo was an after-the-fact attempt at "depth" to let the audience off the hook. I found this insulting, just like the flimsy philosophical ideas in Irreversible ("Time destroys everything" -- ooh! That's deep!).

I also think Martyrs opened itself wide open to charges of sexism. At least Hostel had the good sense to have both male and female victims. Martyrs makes the weakest attempt to justify the fact that all its victims are young (and suspiciously good-looking) women. I could practically hear the screenwriter arguing, "See? Just because Martyrs consists of about 90 minutes of female self-mutilation, degradation and torture, that doesn't mean it's sexist!" Sorry folks, but I'm just not buying it. I expect garden variety misogyny in Friday the Thirteen but those movies don't ask me to take them seriously. If you want to make a deep philosophical point, you're going to have to ditch the cartoon violence and other horror tropes.

Overall, Martyrs is well-made and intriguing but the ideology is a total mess and it's not a movie I ever want to see again. That said, I know horror geeks are going to love this one so I'd recommend it to the extreme movie crowd without reservation. Just don't expect a "masterpiece" - Martyrs is far from it.

I've heard a lot of buzz about this film over the years but took a long time to watch it. I'm not a huge fan of extremism and this has always been billed as "one of the most disturbing horror films ever" so I put it off until I felt like I was ready. I've gotta say I ended up kind of underwhelmed.

The film starts off strong. It is relentless, hits us hard with themes of trauma and its persistence in one's life. The story structure in the first 2 acts was a breath of fresh air. I feel like I can typically predict where the story will go in many films but found myself continuously surprised. It's super intense in terms of the violence, yes, but it all seemed to be serving to tell a poignant story.

Then we hit the last act...and the reveal of the antagonists and their motivation was so boring. Then it was just 30 minutes of people beating the crap out of a woman. This isn't unique, this isn't poignant. It's just...sad and frankly boring as far as story structure goes. The ending tries to end on a cerebral note but was just not interesting or thought provoking to me. It frankly just seemed like lazy writing. I ultimately feel like the first 2 acts of the film alone would have made for a better movie.

Overall, yes, one of the more brutal films I've seen. I respect it for the boundaries it pushes while trying to have some substance. However the substance that could've been ultimately fizzled out and I was left feeling like this could've been something more memorable.

...and what we're ultimately allowed to witness is, at its core, some pretty empty-headed, although visceral, existentially sadistic nonsense. Nonetheless, I can't deny that "Martyrs" packs a punch (several of them, in fact, to the face and gut, repeatedly, to its protagonist, after fooling us about who the real protagonist is). It's ultra-violence that Alex and his droogies would lap up like synthemesc milk-plus; presumably the audience is meant to as well. Aha, but auteur Pascal "The Tall Man" Laugier isn't through with us yet! After rubbing our collective noses in viscous pools of vengeance and hallucinatory blood guilt, he dials up the sadism a few more notches with a tiresome third act that trucks in absurdist fantasies of an elite cabal searching for proof of an afterlife through the inducement of a tortured martyr's vision of what can only be feebly represented by a coruscating white light.

What tripe.

Neither the acting chops of the two leads, which are considerable, nor the overall production values, including some very convincing Grand Guignol splatter and grue, can conceal the vacuous conceit of the film's plot nor the soul-less nihilism of its theme. "Martyrs" leaves its audience numbed by its brutality, but with precious little else, and ultimately comes off as mere torture-porn with a glib pretension of meaning. I won't say it's not worth watching, but be prepared to be unsatisfied. Mayhaps that was Laugier's intent; if so, his intentions were shallow and venal.

Making its Stateside debut, Pascal Laugier's "Martyrs" was the grand finale to a spectacular constellation of fine horror films. "Martyrs" however, is not like a "SAW" or "HOSTEL" in which there are creative forms of torture served for your viewing pleasure, this film has an art house feel to it that leads into the bowels of depravity. It's demonstrates how evil man can be for the share pleasure of scientific research. It reminded me of a brochure that I received depicting the horrors of how animals are slaughtered for human consumption. If that is a brochure you'd rather not digest before dinner, "Martyrs" is the type of film you may not want to view on a full stomach. Brilliantly executed in ways better described only as experimental, Pascal Laugier takes us to the end of the tunnel, the last stop, to a place where there is no longer any separation between humans and animals, predators or prey, it' a place so dark, you will no longer have to imagine for now it has been recorded on celluloid. All the "SAW" or "HOSTEL" or any other torture porn created to date has nothing on "Martyrs". Why? Because they French know their cinema business like no other. They leave nothing up to the imagination and nothing is too taboo for them whereas here in America, filmmakers tend to like to draw certain lines when it comes to making horror films for shock value. "Martyrs" is one of the few crossover films that could play at a horror film festival, as well as a intellectually artsy festival or a gay & lesbian festival alike. It covers the gamut in storytelling and that is what makes this film so powerful and so inherently haunting ,it will carve many putrid memories in your phsyque long after viewing. I would not recommend this film to folks with weak stomachs.

A young girl named Lucie escapes from a hellish nightmare of torture and depravity. She meets a friend, Anna, who stands by her as the two grow up. But Lucie's scars are mental as well as physical and 15 years after her escape, she seeks revenge on her captors. Anna is soon dragged into the situation and what she finds makes her own abusive childhood seem like a walk in the park.

I love horror movies. I like many movies that have been lumped into the "torture porn" category (even though I hate that term) and I like horror movies that can disturb me and make me think with barely an ounce of gore. But I felt more manipulated than moved by Martyrs. The story of Lucie getting revenge on her abusers and dealing with the scars of her past while unraveling the mystery of her capture could have made for an interesting movie, but the Lucie part is over fairly quickly. And I don't really want to give too much away but the Anna part of the story seems to go out of its way to be needlessly "unpleasant" for a motive that just didn't work on me. I appreciate the movie for trying to be different (and succeeding at that) but in the end, I was bored, frustrated, and disappointed.

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