Easily one of the most difficult horror films I've ever had to endure. The brutal violence was so shocking and graphic that I had to disengage many times and force myself to look at the screen. In that regard, I can't say I've ever seen another film like it.

Usually, horror films tend to have quite a naff plot that merely acts as the framework for frightening scenes, but Martyrs has pretty great storytelling... for a while, at least. After the somewhat trope-y intro featuring a demon, we cut to "15 years later". We see a pretty normal family going about their daily routine, and I was trying to determine if the teenage girl was one of the girls in the intro, but the ages didn't seem to make sense. We hear about their family drama and director Laugier's power move here is to let this scene go on just long enough so that you're invested in them before the girl from the intro strolls in and blows them all to kingdom come with her shotgun. I was expecting one or more of them to escape but when they all died, I was completely stunned.

This girl, Lucie, was tortured by the parents 15 years ago and has come back to take her revenge with the help of her reluctant friend Anna. Unfortunately, the revenge doesn't bring Lucie the peace she's looking for, and so the film must go on. Rather like Hitchcock's Psycho, the protagonist of the film changes when characters begin to lose their lives unexpectedly, something that is very hard to pull off dramatically.

I thought I could handle the blood and violence up to this point, but when Anna discovers another torture victim, the gore is cranked up a notch. The victim has cuts all over her body and a metal fixture screwed into her skull, which Anna helps her take off. This victim sees roaches all over her body and tries to cut her own arm off, and it's an act of kindness when security rushes in and shoots her in the head.

At this point, it is revealed why the torture is happening in the first place: this is an experiment to find actual 'martyrs' who can see life after death while they are still alive. They are looking for people to make expressions like the one made famous in The Passion of Joan of Arc. This is where the film heads downhill for me. It's just a silly and uninteresting concept, in my opinion. If they can see on the other side, so what? Are we going to learn anything about it?

Anna is selected as the next torture victim, and we are forced to watch her get violently tortured for about twenty minutes, although it feels much longer. This could have easily been a montage to save the audience's feelings, but Laugier really wants you to experience some of what Anna does. Truthfully, I could barely watch these scenes and felt myself emotionally disengaging and looking at my phone instead just so that I wouldn't have to suffer as much. For making me feel that way, Laugier gets an A for 'horror'. But I also got bored. Where is this all supposed to be going? To use a peep show expression "Obviously, this dynamic could go on indefinitely. I could see that it was going to take a miracle for her to escape, and this didn't seem to be the sort of film that had a happy ending, so I gave up hope fairly quickly.

As for the ending... I just didn't care for it. It felt like a punchline to a bad joke.

I watched the film on Tubi (which is surprisingly full of great little gems like this and Bad Boy Bubby) and it lined up the 2015 American remake. Out of curiosity, I decided to skip to the end of the film to see if it was just as bad as one could predict it would be. From what I could make out, this version of Anna had a lot more skin than the French version and just a few smears of blood all around. Why do a remake of a notoriously bloody film if you're going to make it so tame?

But while Anna still seems to be having her martyr experience, another girl has come in with a pistol to save her? Admittedly, I was craving some of this catharsis at the end of the original, but I can see how it absolutely weakens the bleak ending. Still, there were some funny lines: "What does the other side look like?" "You tell me." *BANG*

I'm in absolutely no hurry to see Martyrs ever again, but I must admit I appreciate when directors are unflinching in their resolve to give their audiences extreme emotions, whether they be positive or negative, and I can't think of a time I've felt so physically uncomfortable watching a film. I wish there hadn't been any emphasis on the supernatural, as that brought the tone down for me, but I guess you can't have everything.

7.5/10