Martyrs (2008)

PASCAL LAUGIER

MARTYRS

FRANCE, 2008

9/10

"Lucie was only a victim. Like all the others. It's so easy to create a victim, young lady, so easy. You lock someone in a dark room. They begin to suffer. You feed that suffering. Methodically, systematically and coldly. And make it last. Your subject goes through a number of states. After a while, their trauma; that small, easily opened crack, makes them see things that don't exist."

Grisly, graphic, and brutal, MARTYRS (2008) has gained quite a lot of publicity as being an incredibly disturbing horror film. This is another film that I watched for the first time last night, even though I've been meaning to watch it for a very, very long time.

Going into MARTYRS, I had quite a few ideas of what I expected this movie to be. I thought that what would make the movie disturbing would be HOSTEL or SAW levels of gore, I thought it would be a mindless flick that shed more blood than needed. I thought it would be various situations created for the use of gore for gore's sake, that there would be no higher purpose to the film. And boy, was I wrong. MARTYRS does have gore, true, but it is not overplayed, and honestly there are films which are much, much gorier. Not to say that it isn't gory, it is, just not as much as you may expect. MARTYRS instead disturbs you by the way it handles the gore, the way it shows the tortures for what they, not glorifying them in any way.

This is why I don't like why I have seen some people on the Internet refer to this as "torture porn". I'm already not a big fan of the term, but MARTYRS is not torture porn. Unlike HOSTEL, it does not glorify the violence, not does it attempt to entertain (more on that later) using the violence. MARTYRS exists to make you feel uncomfortable, to disturb you. Sure, there may be a few people who enjoy the gore in this, but on the whole it exists for upset the viewer more than anything.

As I mentioned earlier, MARTYRS is not meant to entertain. That may sound weird, seeing as don't all movies exist to entertain? This film, however, does not. It exists to make you incredibly uncomfortable and shocked, and it certainly does that. Everything else about this film is top-class. The cinematography and gore effects are both amazing, the soundtrack (though there is very little of it) is incredibly effective and adds to the experience of this film. The acting is fantastic, and the characters are interesting, complex, and believable  As much as I love popcorn films and mindless slashers, this film is on a tier above the rest. It is dark, shocking, and atmospheric. Though it is an incredibly uncomfortable experience, I recommend that everyone watched this film. There is not much that one can say about this film, so I recommend that you watch it for yourself.