THE CRITIC-AL LIST
Reviews by Alan Jones
5 STAR FAB - 1 STAR RUBBISH

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Directed by Pascal Laugier. Starring Mylène Jampanoï, Morjana Alaoui and Mike Chute. Horror, Fr, 90 min. Web Site

I was the first person in the world to review Pascal Laugier’s MARTYRS, the day after it’s Cannes 2008 premiere. For Fangoria.com, and Pascal was kind enough to credit me for helping people understand what his movie was really all about. And that’s the pain of being human. Not torture. When I wrote the review I had no idea I knew who Pascal was. To me he’d only made an uninteresting debut with the ghost fantasy SAINT ANGE/HOUSE OF VOICES before MARTYRS. So I was surprised when he tuned up as our guest at FrightFest 2008 to learn we’d met before via our mutual friend director Christophe Gans on the set of BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF. Pascal had directed the ‘Making Of’ electronic press kit. We have since become firmer friends thanks to MARTYRS being on the fantasy festival circuit this past year. Here’s my original review, slightly amended for plot content purposes, because the movie is receiving a limited theatrical release in the UK prior to its DVD launch via Optimum Releasing:

The most talked about, shocked about and divisive movie at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival was only screened twice in the market place and quickly became the hottest topic of every conversation. Those who loved it absolutely loved it. Those who hated it felt it marked the nadir in extreme degradation, the ultimate in so-called ‘torture porn’ and the end of cinema civilization. But Pascal Laugier’s MARTYRS is the clearest indication yet that today’s French horror is the only platform allowing a currently all-too-safe genre to find its excitement, power and strength again.

For Laugier’s esoteric development of an everyday tabloid headline into a Clive Barker underworld nightmare is a challenging, disturbing and thoroughly uncompromising work. It couldn’t be further from the tired old style mainstream scary movie purveyors seem to think is all that’s required. But with INSIDE, FRONTIER(S) and HIGH TENSION before it, French filmmakers blissfully have no problem inspiring discomfort, blasphemy or gut-wrenching offense. Using violent outrage to drive their allegorical plots to evoke the Big Questions of our time. And that fantastic potency is exactly what should be at the heart of such stimulating darkness exploring the human condition. It begins with a disheveled girl breaking into the country house of a well-heeled family and graphically blowing them away with a shotgun. Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi) is convinced they imprisoned and debased her in a disused slaughterhouse as a child. She escaped those icy confines and has spent years in a mental hospital trying to make self-harming sense of their motives and identifying her captors. Her best friend Anna (Morjana Alaoui), herself a victim of child sex abuse, is doubtful Lucie has got the right people. Yet her unmistakably lesbian attachment has made her an unwilling partner in this crime of passionate uber-vengeance. As Lucie wrestles with personal demons (splendidly visualized as her deformed twin), Anna explores the house for clues that this family was indeed the perpetrators of such deplorable barbarity. She finds an underground series of immaculately pristine vaults with blown up photographs artfully placed on walls of the saintly and the war-tortured dying for their beliefs through the ages. And she finds a babbling girl chained-up with a metal blindfolding visor riveted to her head. It’s then a sinister group arrives on the scene and the full provocative force of MARTYRS hits home. From here on the plot must remain deliberately obscure because the horrendous journey Anna is compelled to embark on should not be revealed. Words of advice: when the going gets tough, and it really does in a 10 minute silent orgy of subjugation, hold on tight through all the stark brutality, eye-watering flaying alive and other upsetting imagery. The rewards are truly astonishing in what emerges as the most strangely beautiful, utterly thrilling and profoundly astounding shock conclusion to a horror film in some time. That such a viscerally audacious, ballsy piece of brilliant filmmaking has come from the writer/director of the frankly dreary SAINT ANGE is another welcome MARTYRS surprise. That producer Richard Grandpierre was also responsible for Gaspar Noe’s IRREVERSIBLE is not. Laugier’s Sadean tour de force is equally as confrontational, cynical and nihilistic about the unbearable latent violence in our multi-cultural/multi-faith society - the ethnicity of the two committed leading actresses no accident but precise choices. Nor does it offer any quick-fix redemption or easy answers either as the sinfully jet-black twist attests, one you’ll be arguing about for days after. MARTYRS uses a fairytale template in essence – two lost innocents against evil ogres – lyrically shot tight close-ups for intimate vicarious collusion and ideas from 2001, ROSEMARY’S BABY and HELLRAISER to punch home its no pain no gain emotional anxieties. It couldn’t be bolder in this era of blandness, caution and self-censoring that seems sadly endemic in production and distribution systems. In fact it faced one of the biggest censorship wrangles in French distribution history. How regrettable that France, the birthplace of studious genre appreciation, cannot come to terms with its own cutting edge industry or the inspired talents breaking all accepted rules to make it a shining artistic beacon to the rest of the genre world. Even if you don’t like MARTYRS, you will have to admit you have never seen its like before.

If you stay the course and stick with it through the closing credits, you will see the director’s dedication to the savage splendor of Dario Argento’s baroque cinema. Those who hadn’t guessed this from Laugier’s gloriously unapologetic blend of the surreal, the excessive, the repulsive and the unpredictable will have no problem embracing MARTYRS for the stunning masterwork and unforgettable experience it so reassuringly is. 

Alan Jones

© London FrightFest Ltd. 2000-2009
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