Martyrs (2008)

“Martyrs” is the best horror movie I’ve have seen since starting this blog. While it is considered to be a part of the New French Extremity Movement, I don’t feel that the film is overly indulgent or excessively violent. I say this because all of the violence, and there is plenty, feels acceptable due to the context that the story provides. There is method and reason behind the violence, more so than for purely “getting off” like the violence displayed in films like “Hostel”. This movie feels fresh and is full shocking, adrenaline inducing moments that keeps the viewer completely engaged from beginning to end. The cult in this movie is unique from all of the other films I covered this week because they are not religious fanatics (in the normal sense at least), Satanists, or mislead followers of a dark power. These cult members are highly educated, powerful, methodical, and appear normal in every sense. It is their normalcy that makes their ulterior motives frightening; their intensity is on par with a serial killer like Buffalo Bill. The version that I saw included an introduction by the writer/director Pascal Laugler who both apologizes for the film but thanks you for watching his film. I highly recommend this film to everybody.

SPOILERS!    SPOILERS!    SPOILERS!     

The film begins with a young girl, Lucie, running barefoot through an old industrial complex. She is placed in an orphanage after investigators determine that she had been locked up and physically and mentally abused for an extended amount of time. She was not sexually abused and that leaves the investigators without a standard motive. At the orphanage, Lucie befriends Anna, who takes it upon herself to help the troubled girl. Early on Anna learns that Lucie believes that she is being stalked and tormented by a ghoulish woman covered in scars, and Anna is left unable to help her friend.

15 years later Lucie attacks a family at four while they are having breakfast one morning, killing all of them with a shotgun. She does this because she is certain that the parents are the ones who had kidnapped her and tortured her years before. After the brutal killings, Lucie calls Anna and asks her to help hide the bodies; Anna is furious because Lucie had promised to only check to see if this was indeed the correct family, verifying a picture that had appeared in a recent newspaper. Anna soon arrives at the secluded house and begins cleaning up the mess and dragging the bodies to a hole in the yard in which the mother of the family had previously dug up. As she is doing this, she discovers that the mother is still alive and tries to save her but Lucie comes into the room and brutally attacks the mother, smashing her head in with a hammer. Lucie then beings to panic when she realizes that the ghoulish woman is in the room, who begins cutting Lucie with a knife and smashing her head against the wall. Anna watches this and realizes that the ghoulish woman is all in Lucie’s head, that Lucie has been hallucinating this entire time. In a flashback we learn that Lucie had a chance to save another young girl who was also being tortured but when off instead, that the ghoul was Lucie’s guilt manifesting itself. The hallucination climaxes when Lucie slits her own throat and dies in the yard. Anna is left grieving over the loss of her friend and the consuming doubt that this family had anything to do with Lucie’s kidnapping and torture.

The next day Anna discovers a secret passage while cleaning the house, finding a full underground bunker beneath the house. Doubts that the family was innocent quickly evaporate when Anna finds a tortured woman in the bunker with metal bindings covering her eyes, ears and other parts of her body. Anna tries to comfort the scarred woman, bringing her up into the house and drawing her a bath. Anna tries to remove the metal bindings from the woman’s head, only to peel off skin from her scalp and causing more pain. The woman tries to kill herself and Anna tries to stop but before she can the woman is shot in the head by a stranger in the hallway. Suddenly the room is full of strangers dressed in black, demanding to know who Anna is and where the family members are. Anna is taken prisoner and locked in the bunker. She is finally interrogated by the cult’s leader, known only as Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle explains that their organization has been trying to find martyrs, those who see past this world and into the Other after they experience inhuman amounts of pain and suffering. She shows Anna pictures of those who they consider to be martyrs, and continues to explain that most people are only victims and not martyrs so they are forced to try their experiments time and time again. But they have found that young women are most susceptible to the transfiguration, so Anna is chosen as their next experiment.