- Director: Pascal Laugier
- Writers: Pascal Laugier
- Stars: Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin
- Runtime: 1 Hour, 39 Minutes, subtitled, French
- Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/342IEaY
Martyrs (2008) Review
Synopsis
We see old footage from 1971 that shows where they rescued a child, Lucie, from an abusive kidnapper. She wasn’t raped, but she was seriously abused. The grainy, old video continues to show her growing up in an orphanage, and she appears to have made only one friend, Anna, the entire time. We see early on that Lucie cuts herself. Credits roll.
Fifteen years later, young Antoine wants to drop out of school and be with his girlfriend, but his family is mostly just annoyed. We see a newspaper clipping on the wall that shows that his sister recently won an award for her swim team. There’s a knock at the door, and a woman is there with a shotgun, who immediately kills both parents. The woman says the parents did something to her and then kills the son. She goes looking for the daughter, who isn’t very hard to find. Once they’re all dead, the woman starts crying to herself. The woman is the grown-up Lucie, who calls Anna to come and help her clean up.
While she waits, she’s attacked by some kind of feral woman-creature who cuts her repeatedly with a straight razor. She runs outside, straight into Anna, who has finally arrived. Anna goes inside, verifies that the family is dead, but doesn’t find the monster. Anna sews up the huge cuts on Lucie’s back and then helps clean up the bodies.
Lucie says the parents were the ones who kidnapped and abused her all those years ago; she recognized them from a recent newspaper photo about the girl’s swim team. Anna once again rescues Lucie from the crazy woman-creature, and it starts looking a lot like Lucie is imagining the creature. The mother, whom we thought was dead, isn’t quite there yet, and Anna locks Lucie in the bedroom and tries to get the mother out of the house.
We get occasional flashbacks to Lucie as a little girl, strapped to a toilet-chair and abused by someone. At one point, she gets loose and finds another woman held prisoner, but she’s not able to help and leaves her behind.
Lucie gets out of the bedroom and kills the mother for real this time. The feral woman attacks Lucie again, and we see that this woman is what Lucie sees when she’s cutting herself. It seems to be guilt over the woman she left behind to continue to be tortured. After they fight for a bit, Lucie cuts her own throat, or maybe the imaginary guilt-monster did it for her. Either way, Lucie dies.
The next morning, Anna hears someone else in the house and finds a hidden panel in the basement, concealing a dungeon and photos of all their victims. Maybe Lucie wasn’t as crazy as we thought. There’s even a sub-basement with that very same woman, or possibly someone else in the same predicament, chained up in there after so many years. Anna releases the woman. The woman is all cut up and scarred; she’s been through a lot in the past two decades. She’s got a metal helmet that covers her eyes, and it’s literally bolted to her head.
Some people wearing black storm the place and shoot the scary-looking prisoner-woman in the head. Only they’re not the police. They know all about the secret room, and they lock Anna up in there. They dispose of the rest of the bodies and clean the place up.
An older woman comes in who seems to be in charge. She knows who Lucie was, and wants to know what kinds of things she imagined. She calls Lucie a martyr, able to come back from that torture and live with the pain. The whole “program” is designed to create martyrs, people who are so close to death they can see the “other side.” Later, Anna wakes up chained to a chair. She is tortured and abused for months, if not years.
Then they strap her down to an operating table and surgically remove her skin. Finally, she becomes… a martyr. The old woman asks, “Did you see it? Did you see the other world?” and Anna whispers to her, telling her what she sees. Things go badly from there.
Commentary
This didn’t have the gritty realism or sexual content of “The Bunny Game,” and it didn’t have the comedic elements of “Grotesque,” or the taboo nature of “A Serbian Film,” but it definitely lives in the same category. This was much more a fictional story with plot, characters, and a story to tell. Still, the real horror here is that we all know this sort of thing happens regularly in real life. Maybe not to the extent showed here, but yeah, this has probably all actually happened at some point in reality.
There are a lot of surprises here. I was surprised to see the family gunned down. I was surprised to see the killer feral woman monster. I was surprised to see Lucie kill herself. I was surprised to find out Lucie wasn’t completely insane. I was surprised to find out the old woman’s plan actually worked.
The ending, surprisingly, made me think of Hellraiser. Going to “a different place” through pain is kinda what that whole series is about.