Trigger warning : Extreme torture, severe trauma, self-harm, and graphic violence.
Martyrs came out in 2008 and is considered great by most in the horror genre.
Or too brutal for muggles.
It is on many (if not all) lists of movies to avoid as they are the toughest to watch.
And this is where I’m going to lose a lot of credibility points in people’s eyes, but I didn’t like it.
I don’t like most French movies (being French, I’m too aware of their limitations), but here it’s surprisingly not what bothered me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Revenge should feel better than this
In Martyrs, we follow a troubled young woman named Lucie who’s been abused for years. Trauma built up into revenge and she kills an entire family, certain that they were part of the cult that tortured her.
Her best friend Anna joins her at the crime scene, and Lucie ends up killing herself there due to a severe mental health crisis, leaving her friend alone in the carnage.
A noise makes Anna dig deeper into the walls of the house, and instead of fleeing like a normal human being, she investigates like the final girl she is written to become.
There she finds tunnels filled with pictures of tortured girls. She also finds a living one that she tries to help.
Breezing through the plot holes
And this is where the movie either starts for people, or falls into stupidity for me.
We discover that the cult abducts and tortures women to find out what goes on after death through martyrdom.
They try different techniques to reach that level of crossing between life and death, for their subjects to be able to tell them what they see or experience.
And the only way to be able to know that they’ve reached that state is through their eyes.
Are you following so far ?
Yes ? So why in anyone’s name would they torture the bathtub lady by screwing a metal plate to her face, thereby covering her eyes completely ?!? It can be lifted, sure, but at what point is it worth it ?
Was she just a test run with no will to follow through ? A very weird kink ?
Because if my one access to know someone is experiencing a death-like state is for their eyes to roll back up, I’m not putting them in a blindfold.
The whole sensory deprivation hood and metal blindfold setup feels like extra edgy prop design just to look cool, before they remembered they actually needed to check them for their experiment.
Torture porn : French edition
Anyways, Anna gets kidnapped, fed beige goop daily and gets punched multiple times a day.
I know there is more to this movie than this, but it’s what it felt like watching it for the first time.
Mind you, she mostly just gets punched in the face. This is important for the next step.
When the cult lady decides she’s been through enough to move on to the next stage, this is where things go from endless women abuse at the hands of men, to stupid women abuse at the hands of a woman.
Anna gets flayed. Her entire body.
Yeah you read that right.
Being punched for months or years gets your entire body numb enough to pain into surrender?
I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think nerves work that way.
If my face is bruised to all hell, I’ll still feel my toe as it bumps into the corner of a desk.
Flaying it should feel worse. And yeah, it’s explained that they reach a level where physical pain shouldn’t affect them anymore, but show something other than months of beatings then. Pull some nails, I don’t know…So so dumb.
The mystery lives on
The ending is at least pleasant. I’ll give it that.
The cult lady gets Anna to reach martyrdom, and gets the answer she desperately was looking for.
It is whispered in her ear.
They plan a big party with all the cult members to finally reveal what comes after death.
And the cult lady kills herself before ever telling them, or us, the audience.
Anna ends up in a comatose state, eyes looking up.
The end.
Honestly, I’m glad we didn’t get an answer, I like open ended movies.
And considering the dumb choices this one made, it’s a relief it didn’t go one way or another, and just left it a mystery. It’s mainly torture-porn wrapped in philosophical nonsense in the end.
Like if Hostel had an ulterior motive other than money.
The acting is good for a French movie, the plot could have been great but the holes were a bit too windy, the practical effects were great, and the brutality of the deaths worked.
It could have been great. I get the hype.
But nope.
My rating : 2/5 bats
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