Martyrs

One definition of a martyr on a popular dictionary website is someone who endures great suffering. Perhaps then it is me who was the martyr in watching this French horror because endure it I had to, such was the poor quality of a film which has been surprisingly lauded by critics.

The sketchy plot originally surrounds a young woman trying to get revenge on individuals who abused her as a child. This eventually shifts into a torture environment, characterised by such films as Hostel and Saw. It should be noted that writer/director Pascal Laugier has claimed this an anti-Hostel, trying to counterpoint the alleged “torture-porn” genre.

The opening half the film plods along quite neatly, following established tools of the horror genre popularised by modern teen horror movies with a violent unknown figure savaging the female protagonist. The sense that this entity may not be real and may be a perception in the girl’s mind could be an interesting allusion to the irremovable stain of child abuse on a person’s life but this point is not followed up by the movie at all, as a supposed “shocking” film shies away from ever addressing tangible questions of child abuse.

After this initial stage of the movie, it then moves into its torture area. I must admit to not having seen other proponents of the torture genre before yet I did not find the rather pedestrian horror torture frightening, original or exciting. Repetitive scenes of someone being force fed, beaten or what can only be described as “washed with a sponge in a nasty way” become boring with nothing to say other than to ask the audience to watch in a way that felt voyeuristic.

This voyeurism is a major problem – if these scenes are designed for the titillation of some morbid excitement in the audience, it seems they deserve condemnation rather than praise. If however, as they claim, they are trying to make some sort of comment or give meaning then the film fails spectacularly.

The meaning and justification for the individual being tortured in the second half the film (who is a separate character from the female protagonist) is explained in a very loose way by a typical ‘mad female scientist’ character. Pseudo-intellectual babble about transcendence and transfiguration which sounds like it has been written by a below-par arts graduate attempt to purport that those are tortured reach a state so close to death that they have a strong connection to the afterlife. Therefore torturing them gives others an insight into heaven.

This premise leads to the tortured woman reaching this state of “martyrdom” and she informs the mad woman of her experience (only after of course enduring more torture). Without giving away the ending, it feels like the writer is making this up as he goes along with a lack of cohesiveness to the plot, lack of story arc, and the sense that this is two flawed stories spliced together.

If you believe horror should be more about set pieces and eliciting an emotive response from the audience, it also fails with a lack of punch, innovation or the ability to grip the audience with sketchy ideas and uninteresting, bland violence. I have rarely felt so robbed by paying to see A film than I did after seeing martyrs.