Halloween 2021: The True Horror of Martyrs

Wild Bunch

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new film movement started in France featuring highly controversial, transgressive, and provocative films that pushed the boundaries of the type of explicit and graphic content that could be shown in cinemas. Critic James Quandt referred to it as New French Extremity, a term that embodied the works of filmmakers like Gaspar Noé, François Ozon, Catherine Breillat, and Alexandre Aja. There was one film in 2008 that was so intense, so disturbing, and so brutal that it almost singlehandedly ended this era of French cinema: Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs.

Premiering at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, this psychological horror film has since become a test of endurance among young cinephiles: “you haven’t seen truly disturbing cinema until you watch Martyrs.” The movie deserves all of its infamy, as its portrayal of physical and psychological torture is taken to the absolute extreme, with haunting iconography that is unlikely anyone will forget. But the film is so much more than just so-called “torture porn”. As cliched as it may sound, Martyrs is about understanding the meaning of life under a nihilistic perspective. Laugier went on record saying that he wrote the film during a troubling time of depression, and such darkness is deeply felt throughout the story.

The opening of the film, where a bloodied child is running and screaming through the empty streets of an industrial area, shows the death of childhood innocence. Young Lucie Jurin was abducted and tortured by an unknown group, and she managed to narrowly escape with her life, her psyche forever scarred. The orphanage she is placed in lets her meet Anna Assaoui, with whom she develops an unbreakable friendship. The short glimpses of these two girls playing together are about the only moment of light present in Martyrs, as everything that follows is as dark as it gets.

Fifteen years later, Lucie tracks down her two captors, now living in a modern villa with two children. She blows them all away with a shotgun, an act of bloody revenge that is shocking for its unexpected arrival after a normal scene of family life. Laugier sadistically blurs the line between good and evil: by making audiences sympathise with the members of the Belfond family, their death, warranted or not, does not hold the promise of catharsis that is often at the centre of revenge stories. Lucie herself instantly realises that such an act was pointless, as she is still unable to find inner peace.

While Anna comes to her aid to hide the bodies in the Belfond’s garden, Lucie is attacked by a feral creature that had been tormenting her since childhood. It is revealed that this being is a manifestation of her trauma and regret, the hallucination of a girl that she was unable to save back when she escaped her torturers. Even after avenging this girl, Lucie knows that her pain will never end, leading her to end her own life. Suicide is the ultimate desperate act of those suffering from depression, and Lucie’s death is absolutely heart-breaking, especially since her friend Anna is incapable of stopping her. Anna works as the audience surrogate: a stranger to Lucie’s past, full of empathy in trying to save that girl’s soul. Anna ends up discovering a secret passage that leads to an underground jail, where another woman was viciously tortured to the point of insanity. Before Anna is capable of helping her, a group arrives unexpectedly, shooting the woman and taking Anna captive.

One key element of Martyrs that is often overlooked is the casting: while they both deliver terrific physical performances, Mylène Jampanoï (Lucie) and Morjana Alaoui (Anna) are not fully French, for the former has a Chinese father and the latter was raised in Morocco. This decision was likely intended by the filmmaker, since every member of the unnamed group that carries out all of the tortures is made up of white, Caucasian performers without a hint of non-European ethnicity. All of this can be read as a light element of racial violence, enacted against minorities who are seen as less worthy of love and compassion than the others.

Anna’s empathy is not rewarded in the slightest, since she herself will now endure endless, painful tortures. Before that process starts, she is introduced to the leader of the group: a lady only known as Mademoiselle (Catherine Bégin). She reveals the plan of her organisation: to create martyrs, the only people who are able to walk the bridge between life and death, in the hope that they might recount what happens in the afterlife before drawing their final breath. The walls of the underground area are plastered with real-life images of martyrs, their eyes showing pure ecstasy, as if they took pleasure from the senseless acts of violence they endured. This demented plan to uncover the secrets of the hereafter has so far been unsuccessful for Mademoiselle, and now it is Anna’s time to try and reach that holy state in the most profane way possible.

This is when the film becomes primarily about the torture of Anna. The scenes are long, drawn out, brutal, unflinching, and uncompromising in their portrayal of violence. While other filmmakers like Eli Roth gleefully revel in this type of excess, Laugier shoots it in such a stripped-down way that the viewers themselves suffer alongside the character. When Anna reaches a state of complete numbness, it is likely that audiences too are sickened by all the tortures. The ultimate act that she suffers is to be flayed alive, during which she barely reacts. Anna has fully accepted her fate and her suffering, achieving a state of euphoria and transcendence, focusing her pain on something present in her mind’s eye. It is during this scene that the only instance of melodic, peaceful music plays, delivering comforting sounds that are able to relax viewers and, by proxy, Anna herself. This is when Anna has become a martyr, with Mademoiselle rushing to her to have the secrets of the afterlife revealed. What is whispered into her ears is disappointing and disheartening for the group’s leader. She plans a meeting to tell her followers – all elderly white men and women – what she discovered, only to kill herself with a pistol. It is a fittingly shocking end to a film that is chock-full of shocks. The final shot is of Anna, skinless, lying catatonic on a bed of ice, likely about to die.

After 95 minutes of pure, horrifying violence, one question echoes in everyone’s mind: what did Anna see, and why did it prompt Mademoiselle to prematurely end her life? The theories are bountiful, most of which embrace nihilism, stating that life is meaningless and there is no afterlife. However, the answer might be found in the most obvious place possible: the end credits of Martyrs, which show grainy footage of young Anna and Lucie playing together. After all, the last shot of the film is of Anna’s face, which can link those two visuals together. In its own way, it can almost be seen as comforting for Anna’s character: in the darkest, most painful moment of her life, what kept her alive and numb was looking back at her childhood and her best friend, when she was happiest. Is the afterlife a loop of a person’s happiest memories? Maybe, but it definitely is not what Mademoiselle was hoping to hear. Imagine spending a whole life pursuing as futile a goal as learning what happens after death, only to realise that your own life was not lived to the fullest, and likely will not have such happy moments.

This is what Martyrs is all about: the meaning of life, that is, to live it to the fullest. To not be preoccupied with what happens after. To not try to play God. To not deliver suffering against innocents. To simply live. Pascal Laugier managed to make an unforgettable film that is among the hardest to watch, yet still infused a glimmer of hope and a reminder of what truly matters in life. That is the true horror of Martyrs: there is no afterlife, only life.