Martyrs
(2008) 99 Min.
Rated: R (Gore, torture, nudity)
Country: France / Canada
Director: Pascal Laugier
Starring: Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A girl who withstood torture tries to calm her demon by killing her torturers, but involves her girlfriend during her quest.
Synopsis:
The film starts when a young girl escapes from an old warehouse. She bruised and beaten and has a shaved head. She is taken to an orphanage. Her name is Lucie and she does not recall much of her time kept by her captors. Soon a young girl named Anna becomes her friend. Anna learns that Lucie believes she is being attacked by a ghastly creature that neither one of them can stop. Lucie ends up with cuts on her body that she protests were not made by her.
15 years later, in a seemingly normal upper middle class home. A family of four (husband, wife and two kids) are enjoying breakfast when there is a knock on the door. As the father opens the door he is shot in the stomach by a double barrel shotgun held by Lucie (Jampanoï). She then enters the house, picking off each member of the family and shooting them dead. She then places a call to Anna (Alaoui) and informs her that she has shot the people who had tortured her all those years ago.
Anna tries to meet Lucie at the house. Meanwhile, Lucie tries to convince the creature that she has finally killed the torturers, but the creature still attacks Lucie. She is cut a few times and runs out of the house and into the arms of Anna.
Anna helps to clean up some of the house and puts the bodies of the family into a bathroom. She is visibly shaken by the ordeal and would rather not be involved in a murder. During the night it storms and Anna takes the bodies one by one and dumps them into a large pit in the yard. However, the mother of the household is still alive and making noise.
Anna tries to quiet the woman and tries to help her out of the house when Lucie sees them both. Lucie pounces upon the woman, takes a hammer and bashes her head in, ensuring that she is dead. Lucie now feels betrayed by Anna, thinking that Anna never believed her. She cannot understand why Anna would help someone who hurt her.
The ghastly woman appears again and takes a hobby knife, cutting up Lucie’s arms. When Anna looks she sees Lucie cutting herself. In a flashback we see that when Lucie escaped she was too frightened to save another woman in the abandoned warehouse and her guilt then manifested itself in the form of the ghastly woman who attacks her.
Lucie runs through a window out of the house and slits her own throat, which kills her. Anna, distraught, carries Lucie back into the house, cleans her wounds and wraps the body in a white sheet.
The next morning, Anna is making a call to her mother from the house phone when suddenly a hammer falls from the cabinet through a hole in the wall and makes a loud thud. Anna, curious, opens the cabinet to discover a large cement corridor. Anna explores the hall. Its walls are decorated with photos of dying people who all wear the same expression in their eyes.
Anna discovers a locked chamber and opens it. Inside is a very frail and emaciated woman covered in scars. The woman has a visor covering her eyes which is nailed to her skull. Anna removes her chains and helps the woman leave the chamber. She draws a bath for the woman and helps to wash her. She slowly removes the nails from the visor which causes the woman to bleed profusely.
Anna, now truly believing in the torture Lucie endured, returns to Lucie’s body and lies by her side, falling asleep. She is woken up by the sound of the tortured woman wandering the halls, rubbing her body against the wall in an agitated state.
As Anna attempts to help the woman, the woman is shot dead by a group of people dressed in black. They handcuff Anna and sit her in a chair. The people clean the house of bodies and toss them into the pit with the rest of the family.
The leader of the group, known as Mademoiselle, is an elderly lady who explains the situation with Anna. She is part of a society of which Lucie was a test subject. The society’s main goal is to find out information about the afterlife through the testimony of a Martyr. Their belief is that only through torture can a person transform themselves into a martyr and gain knowledge about the afterlife. So far all attempts have failed and have only created Victims. The photos which decorate the hall are images which Mademoiselle and her cult believe were true Martyrs.
Anna is lead into the torture chamber below and is placed in chains. She only receives a meager watery meal and an occasional visit from man who beats her unconscious. This begins a cycle of eating, beatings, and sometimes a sponge bath. With the lack of contact and inability to escape, Anna thinks within herself about her conversations with Lucie as a child and how releasing yourself would help to endure such torture.
Anna no longer fights and releases herself mentally. The cult members then tell her that she is onto the last stage of transformation. They put her on an operating table and cut at her, when we next see her she is being chained up, her body devoid of skin except for her face. She is alive but without skin and bloody. Her face now wears the look of a martyr.
News travels fast among the cultists and Mademoiselle comes to visit Anna. Anna is lying in a small tub of blue fluid and Mademoiselle asks her if she has seen the other side. Anna nods and whispers into Mademoiselle’s ear for a length of time.
The cultists start to gather at the home. All are dressed in black and the majority of them are elderly people. An announcer, called Antoine, informs the group that at last someone has transformed into a Martyr. He happily lets them know that this Martyr was named Anna and that she did speak and told Mademoiselle about the next world.
Antoine goes up to Mademoiselle’s room to let her know that everyone is waiting for her. She is behind a locked door and is calmly taking off her false eyelashes. She asks Antoine if he can imagine what comes after death. He replies “no” and she says “keep doubting” as she pulls a revolver from her handbag, places the muzzle to her temple and pulls the trigger.
The film ends and the credits roll over a montage of footage from Lucie and Anna’s childhood at the orphanage.
Review:
I felt that the first section and middle were very engaging. The dilemma as to whether or not Lucie’s torturers were really that family and whether or not she wasn’t crazy was exactly the kind of thing I like in a movie. Towards the end of Lucie’s ordeal, when the audience is fully aware that she is seeing things, the excitement starts to wane.
When Anna finds the torture victim in the chamber our belief in Lucie is renewed. This sort of twist is welcomed and honestly, the movie could have ended there and been successful.
I, personally, felt the “metamorphosis” phase was too repetitive and a little boring. Although it was a section where basically Anna is tortured, the same events repeat themselves and it feels like time drags on and I wonder if we, the audience, are supposed to also in some way be tortured by this.
I felt this movie had a lot of fresh and clever ideas. There were parts that were meant to be disturbing and to make you think, which I do think made the film successful. I think that since this movie is meant to be disturbing it treads the line. In a very real way people are being tortured right now as we speak, and whether or not to display torture in cinema this way takes the actual act lightly or not is probably a debate best left for another entry.
I also like the jab at Catholicism or the obsession with martyrs and martyrdom that persists in the latter portion of this film. The idea that through these tortured souls, the cultists themselves attain the ability to know about the hereafter. This obsession, for them, transcends any moral abhorrence to torture. Like a mad scientist dissecting in the interest of knowledge, the cult also tears apart the lives of these women to further their own agenda.
Though I do like the ideas that exist in the film, I don’t know if I would strongly recommend it. As previously stated, there are ideas that are very well executed, but it’s also layered within the scenes of repetitive torture that go on for too long and lessen in impact.
