16. Martyrs (2008, Laughier)
By Eivind Langdal
24th October 2009

You probably won’t see me recommending Martyrs to anyone. That’s not because it’s bad (because it isn’t), but because I simply couldn’t encourage another human being to watch it. This film doesn’t just torture its characters. It tortures its audience as well. When I saw it, I thought, “Horror directors have become too good at playing their audiences like instruments. I miss being scared by one of those scenes where it turns out that the sound outside the house was just a cat”. If you haven’t realized this already: this is not a film for the faint of heart. While watching Martyrs, I could hear my own heart pound. That doesn’t happen very often.

As the film begins, a young girl named Lucie is seen running out from what looks like an abandoned warehouse. Judging from the frightened look on her face, the agonizing screams she lets out and the scars on her body, we can assume that the warehouse is anything but abandoned. However, when a documentary filmmaker returns to the crime scene a while later, it has become just that. All that is left is a chair with a hole. Beneath the hole is a bucket. The documentary filmmaker tells us the purpose of the bucket. Maybe you can figure what that purpose is for yourself, or maybe you’ll watch the film. Either way, I’m not telling.

Lucie grows up in an orphanage and befriends a fellow brunette who goes by the name of Anna. The authorities interrogate Lucie to find out what happened to her and who the guilty persons were, but she has no answers. She has become too traumatized, and at night, she is haunted by the memories of what happened. All she can remember is excruciating pain, and when Anna one day finds her alone in the bathroom, she has deep cuts in her arms. She claims it was someone else who did it, but is she telling the truth?

The movie then fast-forwards 15 years, and we get reacquainted with Lucie as she guns down a normal suburban family. Has her mind snapped, or is there a purpose behind her actions? Well, let’s just say you won’t get any answers from me. That doesn’t mean I am recommending that you see the film for yourself. No, all I’m doing is saying that if you are curious, you should by all means see the film. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you think you can’t stomach it, you probably can’t.

Martyrs was made by the French director Pascal Laugier. If you had any stereotypes of the French people being a group of twisted people, this film will not end those stereotypes. I thought the Asians had cornered the part of the film world usually reserved for the most disturbing films, but here, Laugier gives his eastern brethren a run for the money. If a director from another country decides he doesn’t want his homeland to be any worse than the French or the Asians, I’m not sure I want to see the film he makes. No matter who wins that competition, the audience loses.

Martyrs is the perfect example of a film I respect more than I like, mostly because I couldn’t imagine how someone could like it. It doesn’t want to be liked either, which leaves me as a reviewer with a question: if a director’s intention with a film is to torture his audience, and he succeeds, how do I respond to that? Well, if we accept that films can have purposes beyond making audiences enjoy themselves, Martyrs is a success. It does just about everything it is supposed to do.

I say I don’t like the film, but that is only because of the ordeal it put me through. I still applaud it. I knew (or at least I thought I knew) what I was going into when I sat down to see this film, so I really shouldn’t have been surprised when I suddenly, in the middle of the story, started to wonder if that really was a wise decision. But at the same time, this movie didn’t traumatize me. It didn’t scar me in any way. It’s just a movie. Just a simulation. After all, horror movies are about making us feel scared in a safe environment. The problem is that Martyrs is a film that wants us to forget about that safe environment.

In addition to being painfully effective in its methods to disturb its audience, this film also has a point. Yes, that’s right, a point. It asks deep philosophical questions about violence, like: can it have a purpose, and can that purpose be anything else than using violence to stop violence? Can violence give us a deeper understanding of the world that other methods cannot? The film may not find answers to those questions (or maybe it does), but it finds justifications to ask them. Now, that really disturbs me, because by finding justification in asking deep questions about violence, it also finds justification in torturing its audience.

As the doctor says, this might hurt a little.