As a little girl, Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi) has been held captive and abused by a group of strangers. The girl escapes and is brought to an orphanage, where she meets Anna (Morjana Aloui), who is fast becoming the only person the traumatized girl trusts.
Fifteen years later, Lucie sees a picture of her tormentors in a newspaper. Despite Anna's moderating influence, the hallucination stricken (if the things she sees are in fact hallucinations and not something far worse) young woman is hellbent on getting revenge for the things that were done to her - if just to alleviate the fear and the feelings of guilt that make her life hardly bearable.
Martyrs is another entry into the new(ish) French horror sub-genre of the New Cinema of Cruelty (you could also call it Torture Porn plus, if you like) like Frontier(s) or Inside. For me, this turned out to be the most effective and therefore most unpleasant film of its kind I have seen. How much this will do for (or rather to) you will probably depend on your reaction to the tonal and thematic shift the film makes at one point. Whereas other films of the sub-genre go exactly into the direction you'd expect, Martyrs takes a much weirder (in more than one meaning of the word) turn by which what initially seems to be a film that talks about survivor guilt in the most blunt way possible transforms into something closer in sensibilities to Barker and Poe. For some, this shift will probably ruin the film, for others like me, it will actually make it worthwhile (if "worthwhile" is a word one wants to use for a film that tries to emulate the feeling of being repeatedly hit in the head with a blunt object, that is).
What the shift undeniably does is make talking about Martyrs decidedly difficult. I'm usually not shying away from spoilers, but in this case I (like most other reviewers on the 'net, it seems) think going into details would derive the film of some of its power.
So, what else can I say? I can most certainly compliment the actresses (and this is at its core a film about women, for better or worse - queue your own thoughts about the violation of women on screen here; at least nobody can reasonably blame the film for violating women on screen for our entertainment) for their performances, which at times reached a level where I found it physically painful to watch what happens to them. (Yeah, that's a compliment in this context).
I can also say that Pascal Laugiers direction is so self assured, tight, yet at times strangely abstract in its depiction of suffering, while still not dehumanizing the victim of violence - I know, this does not make much sense on paper - that I am now even looking forward to the Hellraiser remake he is directing next.
If you feel prepared for a cinematic experience lying (based on your disposition) somewhere between rather unpleasant and extremely disturbing, Martyrs should be your film. Just don't think that it will do what you expect it to do at all times.
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1 comment:
I liked Sade's vision, that the director incorporated into the movie:
"Martyrs are rare.
A martyr, that's something else...
A martyr is an exceptional thing. It survives suffering, the lacking of everything.
We burden it with all the evil of the world, and he transcends himself."
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