MARTYRS

1971. Lucie, a young girl who had been missing for over a year and kept imprisoned in an abandoned slaughterhouse, is found in a confused state while wandering along the road. Lucie managed to escape her captivity, but she is locked inside herself and does not intend to tell anyone what happened to her during that long period of suffering... no one except Anna, a peer who soon becomes her best friend inside the hospital where she is admitted. Fifteen years later, Lucie is still shaken by that event that changed her life forever, but one day she recognizes in a photograph in a local newspaper the faces of her captors and, together with her loyal friend Anna, goes to their house armed with a hunting rifle. It will be the beginning of a spiral of horrors and sufferings. Who are the martyrs? A martyr is someone who, according to the Christian religion, sacrifices themselves, their life, and becomes a witness to a message of faith even in the face of the most atrocious tortures. Martyrdom, therefore, by the very meaning of the term, is a vehicle through which a message of such importance is meant to be transmitted that it transcends the very condition of being alive. Two are the elements that lie at the heart of martyrdom: faith and torture; the same elements that Pascal Laugier, director and screenwriter of 'Martyrs', places at the center of his harsh reflection on religious ethics and the aesthetics of violence. Laugier, already the author of the suggestive but not entirely successful ghost story 'Saint Ange', is part of that group of talented French directors who are rewriting the history of French horror cinema: since, in fact, in 2003 Alexandre Aja directed 'High Tension', French horror cinema seems to have no limits to what can be shown and told. Already in the early months of the new millennium, the French had demonstrated their predisposition to the 'extreme' with two authorial parentheses that made a lot of noise and broke the taboo of violence and sex even in the essay circuit: the two films in question were 'Baise-moi' and 'Irréversible'. The very young Aja then had fun creating a thriller-splatter that would direct that type of efferate violence towards a more commercial type of cinema, naturally aiming at a fun and entertaining festival of special effects, made of blood splatters and severed limbs. The way had been paved and since then have come 'À l'intérieur', 'Frontières' and more recently 'Martyrs', all products focused on the extreme spectacularization of violence and suffering, a characteristic well marketable in recent years especially thanks to the great success that the sub-genre of so-called 'torture porn' is having. 'Martyrs' can perhaps be considered the point of no return of all this. Laugier does not limit himself to special effects, he does not stage a festival of sado-splatter, but rather goes beyond and manages to transfigure real suffering on film. One might think, in fact, that beyond 'Martyrs' there can be nothing in terms of 'torture porn', because with this film the maximum degree of sublimation of the genre has been reached, both in terms of exhibited-suffered violence and in the expressive-conceptual field. 'Martyrs' is a film that acts directly and simultaneously on the stomach and the brain, aims at visual shock but also poses some interesting points of reflection: the spectator is guided by the hand and made a 'witness' (and therefore 'martyr') of a vortex of madness and physical and psychological violence, always more atrocious, always more explicit, but at the same time is given a singular analytical approach to religious fanaticism. 'Martyrs' explores the universe of clerical Freemasonry, of suffering induced for 'noble ends', but does so by emphasizing immorality, the selfish drift, and the 'capricious' grip, resulting effectively critical. In the same way, the bourgeois everyday normality is overturned, here represented by a couple of torturers who, when they are not operating on their victims, are loving parents and respectable workers. The horror of the middle class, the monstrosity in normality, seen from the perspective of someone who has suffered and remained psychologically scarred. Laugier, who in his previous film had demonstrated having a very elegant hand, is in top form also in 'Martyrs' for which he does not renounce his refined and clean style, here strongly antithesis to the extreme images shown. Excellent performances by the cast, in which stand out the interpretations of the two intense protagonists Morjana Alaoui (Anna) and Mylène Jampanoï (Lucie), two beautiful actresses at the service of two borderline characters: Lucie is a mentally disturbed freak and prey of masochism who finds balance in Anna, a girl from a good family who has given up everything for love of Lucie and from whom she suffers a destructive influence. 'Martyrs' is also a schizophrenic film, it changes personality at least three times during its 97 minutes duration: it goes from a revenge film that wants to pay homage to the cinema of the '70s to the pure horror film, made of wheezing monsters (the 'creature' played by Isabelle Chasse is one of the most disturbing and disturbing figures of recent horror cinema!), disembowelments and nightmares, up to transforming itself further into a full-fledged torture movie, made of segregation and sadism. Perhaps it is precisely this last part, however the most important for the conceptual message, that turns out to be the least successful for its extreme sadian repetitiveness, which in the long run could bore the spectator. 'Martyrs' is therefore an important film for its genre, an orgasm within the cinematic genre dedicated to torture, which however manages to provide multiple and interesting points of analysis, including the very reflection on the 'showable' in cinema. Voyeurism yes, but with a soul.