Martyrs (18)

I liked Bunny's comment. It was right on. The reason for "hating on Hostel" while claiming that Martyrs is a work of art reeks of a kind of pretentiousness. Martyrs being a french film is the only reason I can think of for this. Like someone brought a really bad bottle of wine, but it's french and therefor must be better than the Australian bottle, way of thinking. As Bunny states above, Hostel is actually a pretty good (and dare I say smart film). The problem with Martyrs ISNT that it is too smart, the problem is that it's dumb, but pretends to be smart. It was disjointed and poorly written, with a retarded premise. It starts off great with promise, and then makes a sharp turn into goofy and stupid. Let me fill the geniuses in on something.....It's called dopamine. When a body is subjected to extreme stress or pain, the body will shut down, and the brain will flood with the stuff. TaDa, solved your friggen mystery for ya Einsteins. (You'll get this comment if ya watch the movie to the end, which in itself should qualify for martyrdom) But I guess if your going to make a vehicle for an hour of women beating, ya need to dress it up with something.

Well directed, amazingly well acted and genuinely unpredictable, this movie dares to challenge the viewer on every level of response from the gut to the brain. To call it prurient is to misunderstand it.

Prurience rationalizing itself as Art. Theologically vapid, metaphorically callow, revelling and wallowing in the opportunity it slyly gives itself to depict men beating and torturing women. Mademoiselle would have been better advised to sit Vipassana meditation, but that would have made for a thought-provoking narrative, which this farrago - reeking of French Catholicism (and never forget Christianity is simply a primitive blood cult) - certainly isn't. And it illuminates nothing except its own - that word again - prurience.

I dont like this movie..I dont understand how others are liking it.What is good in this movie? not single scene is likeable.WE are human not monster to like these movie..Please next time make movie for human....My head is really heavry after watching it..

I was knackered after watching The Martyrs. The inverse thrill ride finishes fantastically and OTT - this is good and pointless in equal measure. It is not like Spit on your grave; and I do think that Hostel is a much more sophisticated story in comparison. The Martyrs has no redemptive ending to cling onto. A hard watch that has me thinking about it and few people to discuss it with. A general point - too many people use the catch all 'torture porn' like the Daily Mail might. It isn't short hand for every bit of screen violence. It's made discussing modern horror v difficult and one dimensional. Can we ban the phrase and move on.

The film starts out in a vaguely similar vein to ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ (wronged woman out for vengeance), before segueing into psychological horror, then chamber piece, then torture porn and finally philosophical, messianic nightmare. It’s very ambitious, well crafted and very claustrophobic. The two lead girls give their all to some very arduous, difficult roles, the violence (sometimes very abrupt) is quite shocking and the film does manage to be truly quite unnerving: there are moments of horror here that are not enjoyable and hard to watch, rather like Takeshi Miike’s entry in the Masters of Horror serie, ‘Imprint’. However, the film – for all it’s high lofty ambitions and high ideals – is something of a mess, and never really functions as a cohesive drama. Director Pascal Laugier is obviously trying to make a profound statement on why people what horror movies and why some people hurt others, and wants to take his audience to (and beyond) the limit of their endurance, but Martyr’s basic horror framework can’t support such ambitions. For all its technical acumen (great super 16mm cinematography) it remains nothing more than a above-average interest horror film. It’s all well and good to try and show us the deepest pit of human despair, but since so much of the film borrows from other horror movies (Hostel, especially) it’s never very convincing. The film works best in parts, in ten minute segments, but to watch it in bits would reduce it’s impact. It’s very similar to Calvaire and Frontiers, which were both afflicted by the same problem, that they were trying to be rollicking horror thrillers while also trying to produce a truly unnerving comment on modern times. Film-makers CAN have it both ways (The Todd Killings, Targets, Memories of Murder, Seven etc.) but Martyrs doesn’t get it quite right. Despite the horrific finale, I couldn’t get past the film un-even nature, and it just seemed a bit pretentious. Despite that, though, it’s indisputably an important entry in the horror canon for its sheer ferocity, but only horror fans will watch and comment on it with very qualified praise.

I cannot declare "Martyrs" a great film, but its commentary on torture/horror is unique and provocative. Where "Hostel" feeds an adolescent desire to push buttons (as in "Dude, that was sick! I can't believe they went there.") and is superficially told, "Martyrs" takes a far more universal and important theme and never uses its violence to allow for childish reveling. There is no bong smoking humor or nods to pornography. The nudity on display is appropriately unpleasant and not some Maxim magazine objectification. "Martyrs" may be subversive and morally questionable but it has an actual point to make. A point both pretentious and emotionally sophisticated. It is interesting to note that one of the more shocking moments in the film involves not physical violence but a philosophical proposal. I would have dismissed "Martyrs" as just another stylish, ultra-violent thriller if it had not dared to come to the 'pretentious' and, dare I say, poignant conclusion that it does. After so many useless commercial films which exploit the reality of torture for cheap thrills and money, "Martyrs" (however repellent) feels like an almost necessary breath of fresh air. Just another opinion, for what its worth. Godspeed.

this reviewer has totally missed the point, nothing like the laughable Hostel films.

Sorry about all the spelling errors and some missing words in my rant below. It's very hard to proof your comment in the tiny box you have to type it in! So, please don't judge my comment on the errors! 'One the nose' indeed! Tchoh!

I watched this film last night and have just been trawling the net for reviews. To me, the review here is fair. The first half of the film is fantastic – really smart, clever, exciting, scary. The last half is terrible – pretentious, boring, ridiculous. It really annoys me that people here say that critics don't 'get it' and this film is much better than Hostel etc. I'd say that the critics well enough and it's the reviewers here who don't 'get' Hostel. Hostel basically takes the opposite viewpoint from Martyrs in that we look at why one person might exploit another in the worst possible way – we see at the beginning that the central protagonist thinks it is acceptable to pay for sex, possibly even S&M sex. This is not unusual in his, or our world, and the film explores the idea that paying to torture someone might be the next step for a jaded individual who has 'seen it all' (and this is uncomfortable, since we are 'seeing it all' in the film). I think it's amazing, and really clever, that we end up rooting for this unpleasant and initially amoral protagonist – we really go on a journey. The problem with Martyrs is that is that we see the effects of the torture on the victims but the reason given for its doling out is utterly spurious. We know what the "mademoiselle" is up to (far-fetched as it seems, as hopelessly 'one the nose' as it is explained to us and as utterly pointless as it turns out to be) but who are all the people who she employs to do all the torturing? What on Earth is their motivation? Who knows. Hostel is by far the more sophisticated film in that it explores the masochist's motivation and explains it through action and not through a long speech to a protagonist who has no need to hear it, like a James Bond baddy explaining him how he is about to be killed. Except, instead of getting away, we see the torture – even though we know, from what we've seen already, what's going to happen. I think the film maker has had a brilliant idea in looking at iconic images of martyrs – such as Joan of Arc and Saint Sebastian – whose gruesome deaths we take in our stride, and thinking, "How can I make those images resonate with fresh meaning?" But, unfortunately, he made two halves of two different films and came up with a big, noisy, empty mess.