Martys (2008)

I'm a horror fan, and I have been since I was about six years old. But, I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm really having a hard time with this newfangled "torture porn" thing.

If you saw Funny Games and were offended, or you thought Hostel went way over the line, I'd suggest that you stay as far away from Martyrs as you can.

That said, this French film (lumped in with the "New French Extremity" movement, which includes filmmakers like Gaspar Noe of Irreversible infamy and Catherine Breillat of Romance and Fat Girl) is meticulously -- if not perfectly -- crafted. Director Pascal Laugier has an eye for the disturbing image that I haven't seen since Takashi Miike (Audition). I can't exactly say I liked this film, but I can appreciate what Laugier is trying to do. This is the rare movie that actually hurts to watch.

We start with young Lucie, a just pubescent girl who has escaped from some sort of torture factory. We see her, covered in blood and bruises, her hair cruelly hacked off, running barefoot and screaming down an industrial street. Believe it or not, this is actually one of the least upsetting moments in the film.

Lucie is sent to an orphanage, where she is clearly still suffering from the trauma of what was done to her and believes she is haunted by some female-looking creature that likes to stab her with things. She manages to make a single friend, a sympathetic (and perhaps more so) girl named Anna.

Cut to 15 years later. A seemingly normal family -- Mom, Dad, two teenage kids -- are sitting down to breakfast. There's a knock at the door. Dad goes to answer. Lucie, now an adult (played by French/Chinese actress Myléne Jampanoï), stands there brandishing a shotgun. Within minutes the entire family is dead. Lucie picks up the phone and calls Anna (Morjana Alaoui) to tell her what she's done.

To say any more would risk ruining a movie that -- as unpleasant as it is -- is full of some pretty ingenious twists and surprises. Even as it gets more and more ludicrous, it is never less than completely engrossing.

It would be easy to dismiss this film as pure sadism. But -- as is the case with one of my favorite novelists, Jack Ketchum -- I think Laugier is up to something else. He rubs our noses in some pretty extreme stuff, but there is always an undercurrent of self-righteous rage to every beating, shooting, stabbing, etc. It's like Laugier is screaming at us: "Look! Look what we're capable of!" without ever letting us enjoy it. The violence is never shocking in the eye-gouging Hostel sense, or amusingly baroque in the Saw sense. It's just brutal. In this respect, I think Laugier has more in common with a thoughtful provocateur like Michael Hanake (Funny Games, Cache, The Piano Teacher, etc.) than someone like Noe, whose meanspirited Irreversible seemed to revel in the cruelties being inflicted upon the characters and the audience alike. Here, you get the feeling that Laugier really feels his characters' pain. And he wants us to feel it to.

I'm not someone who believes watching movies can really do that much to change someone's consciousness. But Martyrs did give me pause, and lead me to reflect a little bit on real world situations like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and what's happening in Darfur, as well as the real (and underreported) human slave trade in Europe and America. It's easy -- in this age of waterboarding -- to start to view torture and cruelty as something abstract, an idea to be discussed on political talk shows. I give Laugier credit for at least trying to rip the scab off the wound, even if it is only in the context of a really fucked up horror movie.

I'm not going to go so far as to actually recommend this movie. I don't want the hate mail. But, if you've got the stomach for movies like this, you can do far worse.