Martyrs (2008): New French Extremity With a Thesis

Some films you argue about with friends. Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) is one you argue about with yourself, for years, usually at three in the morning. It is the most punishing film to come out of the movement critics christened the New French Extremity, and it is also, awkwardly for anyone who wants to dismiss it as endurance-test cruelty, the most intellectually serious. The brutality is real and unremitting. Underneath it is a genuine argument about suffering, belief and what, if anything, lies on the other side of pain. Whether the argument earns the brutality is the question the film hands you and refuses to answer on your behalf.

I will keep the shape of it vague above the spoiler line, because Martyrs depends more than almost any film on not knowing where it is going. What I can tell you is that it opens as one kind of horror film, a revenge story, propelled by two young women, Lucie and Anna, and a childhood of abuse that Lucie is determined to avenge. Then, about a third of the way in, it performs a structural rupture so violent that first-time viewers often assume the film has broken, and becomes something else entirely, something colder, slower and far worse. The film has two movements, and they are almost two different genres welded at a seam that draws blood.

The movement’s method, taken to its end

To place Martyrs you have to place the New French Extremity, that loose cluster of French genre films around the turn of the millennium that treated the body as a battlefield and the audience’s comfort as an enemy. The current runs through Gaspar Noé’s assaultive formalism, Claire Denis’s cannibal eroticism in Trouble Every Day, Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, and a run of home-invasion and torture films, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside, Xavier Gens’s Frontier(s), David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Ils, that pushed on-screen violence to a place Anglophone horror rarely dared. What united them was a seriousness of intent behind the gore, a sense that the extremity was a philosophical position, that to look away was to miss the point.

Martyrs is where that method reaches its logical and almost unbearable terminus. Laugier is not interested in the cathartic release a slasher offers, the bad people punished, the survivor walking into dawn. He builds the first movement to promise exactly that catharsis and then takes it away, and the second movement is a systematic demonstration that revenge resolves nothing and that suffering, pursued far enough, is being studied for a purpose you will not see coming. The film’s cruelty is structural, engineered to strip you of every genre comfort you brought in, until you are as defenceless as the woman on screen.

What keeps this from being mere sadism is the control. Laugier shoots the horror without relish, in a flat, clinical light, holding on faces and refusing the leering close-ups that a lesser film would use to make cruelty a spectacle. The violence is exhausting rather than exciting, and that is a deliberate and difficult achievement. He also stages a monster in the early going, a scarred, contorted figure, whose true nature reframes everything about the abuse the film is examining, a piece of design and revelation I will hold for below the line. The point above it is that every choice is made with intent. This is not a film that lost control. It is a film in total, terrifying control of an experience most directors would not have the nerve to inflict.

The thesis under the blood

Here is what separates Martyrs from the endurance cinema it is often filed beside. Most extreme horror asks how much you can take. Martyrs asks what suffering is for, and it means the question theologically. The word “martyr” comes from the Greek for “witness”, and the film knows it. Its second movement is built around a proposition that suffering, taken past every limit the human frame can bear, might turn a victim into a witness of something beyond death, that the tortured, at the far edge of endurance, might see through. It is a genuinely disturbing idea because it takes the logic of religious martyrdom, the saint transfigured by agony, and strips out the faith, leaving only the mechanism, pursued by people who want the knowledge and are willing to manufacture saints in a basement to get it.

That places the film in strange and illuminating company. Its truest cross-reference lies outside gore altogether, in Takashi Miike’s slow-burn masterpiece, which I wrote about in Audition and Miike’s hour of romance before the wire. Both films lure you into one genre, romance in Miike’s case, revenge in Laugier’s, and then use the trust you have extended to walk you into a fixed, clinical, unhurried horror about a body being taken apart with intent. Miike and Laugier share the conviction that the real terror is method itself, a calm agent working to a plan.

The deeper kinship, and the reason I programme the two together, is with Andrzej Zulawski’s marriage-as-apocalypse, which I covered in Possession and the divorce filmed as the end of the world. Both films use the extreme, the physically unbearable, to reach for the metaphysical, the end of the world in Zulawski, the world beyond death in Laugier, and both stake everything on a female body pushed past the point of language into a state that the film treats as a kind of terrible transcendence. Adjani thrashing in a subway and Laugier’s martyr on her frame are, at some level, the same image: a woman suffering her way out of the human, and a camera that will not look away.

Is the thesis worth the cost?

I have never fully settled this, and I distrust anyone who claims to have settled it quickly. The case against Martyrs is that no idea, however serious, justifies subjecting an audience to that much simulated cruelty, and that the philosophical frame is a sophisticated alibi for the same appetites the film pretends to critique. It is a fair charge. There are stretches where the film’s intelligence does not soften the sheer unpleasantness of what you are watching, and a viewer who taps out is not a coward or a philistine; they may simply have decided the transaction is not worth it, which is a legitimate verdict.

My own position, arrived at over years, is that Martyrs is a major film that I can only rarely bear to watch, and that both halves of that sentence are the point. It commits, absolutely, to an idea, and it makes you pay the idea’s price rather than describing it from a safe distance. It refuses the escape hatch of catharsis, the escape hatch of a monster to hate, the escape hatch of a meaning you can carry out clean. It is horror as a genuine philosophical operation, and there are perhaps five films in the whole genre of which that is honestly true.

Beware, incidentally, the 2015 American remake, which softens the ending into exactly the reassurance Laugier spent a film demolishing, and in doing so proves his point by accident. The original is the only version that means what it says. It is essential viewing for anyone serious about how far the horror film can reach, and it is a film I will warn you about even as I insist you see it, because both the warning and the insistence are true.

Where to find it: the original French version streams on the extremity-friendly platforms and has a strong physical release. Watch it once, in daylight, with the afternoon free afterwards, because you will need the afternoon.

Spoilers below

The two-part structure is the whole film, so here is what it does. The first movement follows Lucie, who as a child escaped a warehouse where she was imprisoned and tortured, and who now, fifteen years later, walks into a comfortable suburban family’s home and murders all four of them, convinced they are her captors. Her friend Anna helps her clean up, unsure whether Lucie is right or delusional, and this ambiguity, is she a righteous avenger or a broken killer of innocents, is where a normal horror film would live for its whole length. Laugier detonates it. Lucie is haunted by a scarred, twisted female figure who attacks her, and it is revealed the figure is no ghost and no external monster but a hallucination, the embodiment of Lucie’s survivor’s guilt over another girl she left behind in that warehouse and did not save. Lucie cuts her own throat. The revenge story is over, a third of the way in, its heroine dead by her own hand and its central question, guilt, not vengeance, laid bare.

Then the second movement begins, and the film becomes something almost no one is prepared for. Anna, alone in the house, discovers a hidden chamber beneath it, and the family Lucie killed were exactly what she believed: agents of a secret society. An elderly woman, Mademoiselle, arrives and explains the enterprise. The society captures young women and tortures them, methodically, over months, driven by neither pleasure nor information, only by a belief that suffering carried past all limits can produce a “martyr”, a witness who transcends into a state where they can see what lies beyond death and report back. Anna becomes their subject. The final act is her systematic destruction, culminating, after she is flayed alive, in the vacant, transfigured stare the society has been chasing for decades. She has become their martyr. She sees.

And here Laugier springs the trap that turns the film from atrocity into argument. Mademoiselle, before an assembly of the society, receives Anna’s whispered account of what lies beyond. We never hear it. Mademoiselle then shoots herself, and her final instruction to a colleague who asks what Anna revealed is to keep doubting. That is the film’s last line and its entire meaning. Either Anna saw something and its nature was so unbearable that the woman who had devoted her life to reaching it chose death over living with the knowledge, or Anna saw nothing, and Mademoiselle, at the end, understood she had tortured women to death for decades chasing a comfort that was never there and could not face it. The film refuses to tell you which, and the refusal is the point: it has spent two hours manufacturing a witness and then withholds the testimony, leaving you exactly where Mademoiselle is left, in doubt, having paid an unforgivable price for an answer that does not come. Whether that withholding is profound or a final cruelty is the argument you will still be having with yourself years later, which is precisely what Laugier intended.