Martyrs (2008)

Directed by Pascal Laugier. Starring Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin, Patricia Tulasne, Robert Toupin, Isabelle Chasse, Jean-Marie Moncelet, Jessie Pham, Erika Scott, Mike Chute. [R]

Relentlessly brutal art-horror film—a queasy and fussy pirouette on the “torture porn” sub-genre—opens on a ravaged young girl escaping an unknown captor, but she remains traumatized by her experience…and possibly haunted by a demonic entity, ferocious and disfigured. Many years later, she and a close friend from the orphanage in which she was placed set off to exact murderous revenge on strangers that she believes were responsible for her harrowing ordeal, but that’s just the top layer of this challenging/frustrating movie (and you may want to shut your eyes when those layers are sliced open and it digs deeper into the slippery flesh). It should go without saying that the subject matter is not going to be for everyone, and its level of sadistic violence is substantial, but there’s a peculiar (and somewhat pretentious) attempt to transcend genre expectations behind the pain and viscera; as controversial as the extreme cruelty is, perhaps even more divisive is the about-face the film takes just past the halfway mark, which strains credulity and gives the nihilistic inhumanity a pompous purpose. The question of whether it works or not is a complicated one that can best be summed up as: it’s gratifying to find existential substance underneath the pools of gore, but the execution (so to speak) is too single-minded in its shock therapy to do much more than sicken to the point of miserable desensitization. An American remake was released in 2015.

56/100