I think the best way to watch Martyrs is to go into the movie cold. I purposely avoided any reviews that appeared to contain spoilers and read very little about the film before viewing it. Say what you will about the movie, but it takes several truly wild plot turns and part of what I enjoyed about the film is the unpredictability. In the end though, I felt like the narrative was disjointed, the themes weren't fully fleshed out, and ultimately the ideas behind Martyrs struck me as the armature on which to support several scenes of cartoon horror violence followed by sadistic torture.
On the plus side, the movie is extremely stylish and I thought the gore effects were very good. There are several familiar elements in the film but they're combined in such a disjointed way that it never becomes stale. Martyrs is certainly one of the more original horror films I've seen in recent years. The direction and acting were excellent for this kind of movie. Even though I felt manipulated at the end of the movie I couldn't help but find the last 15 minutes or so to be strangely moving. I'll never want to watch this movie again but I haven't stopped thinking about it since viewing it last week.
Now, the bad part: Martyrs really does feel like two different films that both go on for too long and don't mesh together tonally. The first half of the film at first seems to have a supernatural element and the violence is cartoonish and somewhat over-the-top. After the initial shooting though, I thought the film stopped dead in its tracks for a good 10-15 minutes while we watch Marie wailing around and cutting herself. This got a bit dull.
The second half of the film is potentially more interesting but far less entertaining. The cult shows up and Anna is imprisoned and tortured. Watching a seemingly typical nuclear family get blasted across the room by a shotgun is fun. Watching a woman forced to sit in her own waste, take periodic beatings to the face, and have her skin surgically removed, isn't "fun." The torture scenes went on for too long and way too grim and distasteful to be enjoyable.
I'm not a prude. I loved (and own) High Tension, Sheitan, Frontier(s), Inside, The Ordeal, etc. I've seen and enjoyed a lot of movies with some seriously rough content. I just personally think a horror film either needs to be harmless escapism OR, if the idea is to strike a realistic tone, the ideas supporting the film need to somewhat justify the graphic violence on-screen.
For this viewer, Martyrs missed the mark. Maybe it's because the Madmoiselle only appears on screen for a few brief scenes, but the cult aspects of the film didn't come across to me at all, so I had a hard time reading this movie as a critique on religious cultism. Martyrs actually seemed to justify their world-view, since the film clearly implies that Anna DID have a vision and one of her tormentors treats her with compassion near the end, which suggests to me that they're not pure evil and somewhat justified what they were doing to the poor girl.
Really, it just seemed to me that Martyrs was banking on scenes of young, attractive women in agony and all the religious mumbo-jumbo was an after-the-fact attempt at "depth" to let the audience off the hook. I found this insulting, just like the flimsy philosophical ideas in Irreversible ("Time destroys everything" -- ooh! That's deep!).
I also think Martyrs opened itself wide open to charges of sexism. At least Hostel had the good sense to have both male and female victims. Martyrs makes the weakest attempt to justify the fact that all its victims are young (and suspiciously good-looking) women. I could practically hear the screenwriter arguing, "See? Just because Martyrs consists of about 90 minutes of female self-mutilation, degradation and torture, that doesn't mean it's sexist!" Sorry folks, but I'm just not buying it. I expect garden variety misogyny in Friday the Thirteen but those movies don't ask me to take them seriously. If you want to make a deep philosophical point, you're going to have to ditch the cartoon violence and other horror tropes.
Overall, Martyrs is well-made and intriguing but the ideology is a total mess and it's not a movie I ever want to see again. That said, I know horror geeks are going to love this one so I'd recommend it to the extreme movie crowd without reservation. Just don't expect a "masterpiece" - Martyrs is far from it.
On the plus side, the movie is extremely stylish and I thought the gore effects were very good. There are several familiar elements in the film but they're combined in such a disjointed way that it never becomes stale. Martyrs is certainly one of the more original horror films I've seen in recent years. The direction and acting were excellent for this kind of movie. Even though I felt manipulated at the end of the movie I couldn't help but find the last 15 minutes or so to be strangely moving. I'll never want to watch this movie again but I haven't stopped thinking about it since viewing it last week.
Now, the bad part: Martyrs really does feel like two different films that both go on for too long and don't mesh together tonally. The first half of the film at first seems to have a supernatural element and the violence is cartoonish and somewhat over-the-top. After the initial shooting though, I thought the film stopped dead in its tracks for a good 10-15 minutes while we watch Marie wailing around and cutting herself. This got a bit dull.
The second half of the film is potentially more interesting but far less entertaining. The cult shows up and Anna is imprisoned and tortured. Watching a seemingly typical nuclear family get blasted across the room by a shotgun is fun. Watching a woman forced to sit in her own waste, take periodic beatings to the face, and have her skin surgically removed, isn't "fun." The torture scenes went on for too long and way too grim and distasteful to be enjoyable.
I'm not a prude. I loved (and own) High Tension, Sheitan, Frontier(s), Inside, The Ordeal, etc. I've seen and enjoyed a lot of movies with some seriously rough content. I just personally think a horror film either needs to be harmless escapism OR, if the idea is to strike a realistic tone, the ideas supporting the film need to somewhat justify the graphic violence on-screen.
For this viewer, Martyrs missed the mark. Maybe it's because the Madmoiselle only appears on screen for a few brief scenes, but the cult aspects of the film didn't come across to me at all, so I had a hard time reading this movie as a critique on religious cultism. Martyrs actually seemed to justify their world-view, since the film clearly implies that Anna DID have a vision and one of her tormentors treats her with compassion near the end, which suggests to me that they're not pure evil and somewhat justified what they were doing to the poor girl.
Really, it just seemed to me that Martyrs was banking on scenes of young, attractive women in agony and all the religious mumbo-jumbo was an after-the-fact attempt at "depth" to let the audience off the hook. I found this insulting, just like the flimsy philosophical ideas in Irreversible ("Time destroys everything" -- ooh! That's deep!).
I also think Martyrs opened itself wide open to charges of sexism. At least Hostel had the good sense to have both male and female victims. Martyrs makes the weakest attempt to justify the fact that all its victims are young (and suspiciously good-looking) women. I could practically hear the screenwriter arguing, "See? Just because Martyrs consists of about 90 minutes of female self-mutilation, degradation and torture, that doesn't mean it's sexist!" Sorry folks, but I'm just not buying it. I expect garden variety misogyny in Friday the Thirteen but those movies don't ask me to take them seriously. If you want to make a deep philosophical point, you're going to have to ditch the cartoon violence and other horror tropes.
Overall, Martyrs is well-made and intriguing but the ideology is a total mess and it's not a movie I ever want to see again. That said, I know horror geeks are going to love this one so I'd recommend it to the extreme movie crowd without reservation. Just don't expect a "masterpiece" - Martyrs is far from it.