Martyrs integrates the shared experience of Torturer and Victim

This French Movie, directed by Pascal Laugier, and starring actors Catherine Begin, Robert Toupin, Morjana Alaoui, and Mylene Jampanoi, is one of those movies that forever affects your way of looking at the world. The movie’s plot begins with a story about two young girls, Lucie, the victim of severe abuse and torture from an early age, who was able to escape from her tormentors, and Anna, her only and best friend. After 15 years they decided to track down Lucie’s torturers and abusers, and to extract revenge.

From that point in the movie, every story and plot point, scene, and series of events, descends both characters into an unnerving, and raw roller-coaster of a descent into hell.

But it’s not a hell of their making—but one dictated and extracted toward them, from their torturers. You can’t have one without the other. The movie’s cool and calculating examination of the nature and way evil is perpetrated by human being vs. human being is coldly examined from the Director’s point of view. An examination and study of the types and reasons for Torture over the centuries typically revolved around religion and state, apostasy, and war.

Over the course of history, the reasons for human beings rationalizing their infliction of cruelty and torture upon others were not, and are not, mayhem for mayhem’s sake; nor for random bloodlust, as exemplified by such movies as Gaspar Noe’s unbending “Irreversible,” and the gloomy lyricism of Franju’s “Eyes without a Face.” The horror films like the ridiculous “Saw” franchise or the pure shock value of Eli Roth’s and Quentin Tarantino’s “Hostel” are the fodder for the Horror genre, and nothing more.

The Grand Inquisitor Torquemada’s primal bloodlust was a consequence for the so-called religious principle of “purifying” Spain. In that, their intent was to force its citizens to conform to the Grand Inquisition so Spain could have its citizens by force, terror, or sheer pressure, a population of “true-believers.” And in this, we have the true starting point to understand the movie “Martyrs.” Many, who have perished over the ages under torture, may have avoided their fate if they had renounced their own beliefs for the benefit of their captors.

Instead they chose to die as “Martyrs” for their cause—from Joan of Arc, to Rabbi Akeva, to history’s long litany of those burned at the stake as witches, or accused of apostasy and executed in various types of torture perfected over the years. Until and unless they confessed and/or relented their alleged “sins” of believing in things that were determined by those in power to be unacceptable, they died for their true beliefs.

The raw evil displayed in Pascal Laugier’s “Martyrs,” has nothing at all to do with any of this. It is evil for evil’s sake but according to the film’s “civilized French well-to-do” group of conspirators, it was an exercise directed toward its innocent victims to explore their own fears of “life after death.”

As misdirected as the Torturer’s reasons– and as the despotic and inhuman regimes of history have demonstrated– reasons need no reason. This movie’s descent into brutal depravity has more than a moral point and motive–it’s a reflection of the philosophy that human beings, given the choice, want to play both god and the devil.

Shot with the cinematographer’s eye for beauty of the outside scenery, and gifted sense of various interior’s mise en scène, the movie’s graphic violence, cloistered in the secret of inner-world dungeons, is shot using beautiful shadow sand colors– that make it seem so real—and terrifyingly so.

At first, as Lucie and Anna seem to satiate their revenge objective, the old adage that when seeking vengeance build two graves, but that simple saying, sells the movie’s plot and theme short.

That’s not what the film is about. As one of the most “Ferocious Horror Films” ever made I read the film differently–it isn’t a horror film because its content contains horror. When compared and contrasted to the people, regimes, and organizations that justify their insane violence, and terror, the movie’s plot uses torture, only as a metaphor for these tactics—because these reasons are only a means to an end.

In the safety of our movie seats and DVD’s, we get a lesson in life’s unpleasant truths—and serves to remind us who we are, and what we’re capable of. After watching “Martyrs,” your life probably won’t be the same. It’s art, and for art’s sake, one should watch it while remaining in the present, but always remembering the past.

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