Hi. I hope you’re having a great day. I am gonna be honest with you for a minute; you do not have to read the newsletter this week. In fact, I would recommend leaving now. As you already know, this week is about Martyrs, the most traumatizing horror movie I have ever seen. This newsletter is really more of a therapy session for me because I need to talk about this movie and maybe get it out of my head after it living rent-free up there for the last few months. Thank you for clicking; I really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week with A Bug’s Life.
If you are still here, thank you, and are you sure about this? If you insist, I guess. Well, let’s get right into it then. I can’t sufficiently talk about this movie without spoiling it, so if you haven’t seen it and are planning to (I can’t say I’d recommend it), then again, please leave now. Also, like an extreme content warning, if that wasn’t obvious enough by now.
I came across Martyrs while browsing Scarecrow Video in Seattle. They had a list in the horror section titled “Most messed up, disturbing horror film you have?” with a star rating next to each movie. Martyrs was the second-highest on the “Disturb O’ Meter,” which placed it in the “My Life is Ruined” section. Looking back on it, what was I doing? Anyway, the number one film, A Serbian Film, only had one star, compared to the four stars for Martyrs. So, I decided to take a chance on it without doing an ounce of background research. I wanted to wait until it got dark to get the full effect. I had anxiety for the next eight hours while I waited to watch it.
Martyrs tells the story of Lucie Jurin, a young girl who escapes a facility in 1971 where she’s been tortured for the previous year or so. She is placed in an orphanage and quickly becomes friends with Anna Assaoui. Lucie has this constant nightmare where a ghoulish creature is attacking her, but we later learn that the creature is a manifestation of Lucie’s guilt for not helping a young girl escape from the facility when she escaped.
We cut to 15 years later, where Lucie kills the family responsible for torturing her. I was all-in at this point as it seemed like a sort of revenge movie. Reader, it was not that. Lucie and Anna are still in the house when they discover that Gabrielle, the wife, is still alive. Lucie quickly kills her, thinking this will finally kill off the creature that has been haunting her for the last 15 years. When the creature is still there and “attacking” Lucie, she realizes that her only way out of her personal hell is to commit suicide, which she does by slashing her throat with a razor blade that almost made me throw up. It was a phenomenal shot and cinematically beautiful; no chance I am putting that in here, though. I truly don’t know why I kept watching. Mind you, we are about 45 minutes in at this point.
The second half opens with a revelation that Anna was seemingly also abused as a child by her family. She hears something in the basement and goes to investigate — never a good idea. She finds a young woman named Sarah chained downstairs. What followed were two of the worst scenes I have seen in quite some time. At first, it just looks like Anna is going to rescue Anna and nurse her back to health. She takes off her weird helmet blindfold combo. She takes off the helmet, and fo I did not realize it was screwed into her skull. You can probably speculate about the scene. At this point, my hands are sweating, and I can feel the anxiety shooting down my arms as I type this. In hindsight, it probably isn’t even that awful of a scene. I’m sure if I rewatched it, I’d be fine, but I don’t envision that happening anytime soon. The other scene was a weird sound followed by Sarah trying to saw off her wrist because she felt creatures crawling over her. That scene is already not as severe after watching something similar in the new Candyman.
The woman is shot by a group of people who look like some sort of law enforcement agents or something. It seems like Anna is going to be rescued, but that could not be further from reality. Anna is captured by their leader, an elderly woman who goes by Mademoiselle. The Society wants to learn about the afterlife. They do this by torturing young women, who they call martyrs beyond their breaking point. They think this brutal torture will make them transcend this world and gather insight from the afterlife.
The next 30 or so minutes is just an endless stream of Anna being tortured non-stop. It is the bleakest half hour I have ever seen in a film. Sure, it was disturbing to watch, but beyond that, it was just soul-crushing because of how bleak it was. There’s not really much to get into with describing it. It is everything you are probably picturing it to be. However, I did expect sexual violence, and from what I remember, it did not have that, so that is a slight relief. It is just so painful because you can slowly see the light go completely out of Anna through the process as she accepts her inevitable fate. It probably could’ve done without such a long period of torture, but I don’t think it would’ve had nearly the impact it had if it shortened it, so who’s to say?
Anna ultimately reaches the “final stage” where she is flayed, a process which she survives, and enters a transcendence state as Mademoiselle is there to learn all about the afterlife. I don’t really want to talk more about her being flayed because, honestly, it is making me feel physically ill thinking about it. The Society gathers in the living room, waiting for Mademoiselle to reveal what she learned. She is in the bathroom getting ready when she explains that what she heard was crystal clear. Before she can reveal it, she says “Keep Doubting” before killing herself.
There are a few different interpretations of this ending. The one I most closely align to is that Mademoiselle had spent her entire life trying to answer this one question, and now that she knows it, her life is devoid of meaning. Rather than share what she learned, she decides to end her life to prevent others from experiencing the same lack of purpose. Another interpretation could be that what Anna told her was so disappointing, like there’s no afterlife, that she realizes her entire life was a waste and she can’t go on. The second interpretation is a bit more of a positive spin potentially. Perhaps Anna mustered up the strength to lie to her because she knew how much it would break Mademoiselle. This theory could be Anna getting the ultimate revenge, which would connect back to Lucie’s revenge against this same group of people. It could put an end to this whole cycle after killing the leader of the operation. I mean, it’s probably not the optimistic ending that I am hoping for, though, considering every other part of the movie.
The problem with Martyrs isn’t all the torture, I mean, sure, it’s not *not* a problem depending on your point of view, but the problem is that even despite body mutilation past the breaking point, it is still a phenomenal movie. It would be easy to forget about this movie if it wasn’t so good. It might be easy to write this off as your typical torture porn movie. Or your typical revenge thriller. It is so much more, though.
All the brutality has a purpose because the film would not have the effect it did without it. There was an American remake in 2015 that was part shot-for-shot re-creation while also apparently taking out some of the more brutal scenes and giving it a more optimistic ending. Many American filmmakers do this weird thing where they feel like they need to Disney-fy stuff for their audience. Also, I promise we don’t need more remakes of recent international films. I am looking at you, Leonardo DiCaprio, and your Another Round remake. The 2015 film flopped because this is just not a compelling film if you take out everything that makes it a modern classic. Without the brutality, the original would not have been nearly as moving and emotional. We, as an audience, feel absolutely heartbroken for both Lucia and Anna because we have seen a sliver of all that they went through. Director Pascal Laugier created one of the most stunning portrayals of pain and suffering and the lifelong impact that can have in recent memory, even if I want to permanently erase it from mine.