Martyrs

Saw Martyrs, the infamous apex/nadir of torture-porn and a member of the recent wave of French extreme horrors. I've been dreading/anticipating this film for a while. It follows a pair of women, Anna and Lucie. Lucie had been severely abused as a child and now, with Anna's help, seeks revenge on the family that abused her. She goes on a shotgun rampage, killing them, but worryingly there is no sign that these people are anything other than a happy, regular family. Anna can't help but wonder, is Lucy just crazy? Has she got the wrong house? No, it turns out. This is the right house, and Anna gets captured by a cult of people who are trying to produce a modern martyr by torturing people beyond endurance. Then the torture begins.

This is not a conventionally horrifying movie. There are a few jumps in the beginning to make us feel like we're on familiar ground but, like a joke that drags on too long, the film becomes more and more serious. There are no jittery shaky-cams or smash-cuts. Instead there are slow, somber fades to black and long takes. The torture of Anna has the solemn, sad feeling of a documentary on some tragic event. You know that feeling about 3/4ths of the way through a conventional horror, when the protagonists are all essentially just raw meat, exhausted and desperately trying to survive? That exhausted feeling comes over this film after about 15 minutes and stays for an hour and a half. This is mainly a depressing film. The filmmakers seem to be saying "You want to see someone suffer? Have it, then." The film is mean-spirited, forcing horror fans to linger on the un-entertaining and eternal suffering of a woman.

I'm not sure how to feel about this honestly. I'm not particularly a fan of torture-porn myself, so I don't feel personally chastised. Nor do I feel particularly entertained because that was quite depressing, actually. Nor, however, do I feel particularly repulsed. I think I built this film up too much in my mind, alas. I read about it obsessively, like it was a true story. The actual film itself is depressing but, due to my thorough spoiling of it, was about what I expected. For what it's worth, I don't think this film is really about anything, metaphorically speaking. I think it's concerned with horror and suffering and mass consumption of it. A bit of a miss for me, alas. Maybe this is how all of our monsters perish: with a whimper.

Edit: by the way, there are some obvious homages to The Passion of Joan of Arc. This reinforces the whole martyr thing, but I don't know to what end. Sometimes I am not a clever man.