Regarding films, as well as art in general, the very finest are frequently found to levitate above the landscape of the medium, held aloft by the ballast balloons of cultural critique so that it is almost impossible to approach them free of expectation. So it was that I viewed Pascal Laugier's 'Martyrs' with scarcely any awareness of its content or subject matter aside from it being held within the crude crucible of the New French Extremity movement, alongside others such as 'Inside', 'Livid', and 'Trouble Every Day'.
The gratification to be gained therefore from discovering it to be one of the most visceral and transgressive films ever made was magnified intensely. It must be said that I don't approach it lightly, singing the praises of such a film given that its gruellingly graphic violence and harrowing content will surely alienate and repulse many viewers. Indeed, the scythe of opinion sliced audiences markedly in two upon its release, and have remained divided ever since.
In my view, 'Martyrs' easily surpasses almost the entire undergrowth of exploitation or 'torture porn' horror films that have perforated the mainstream over the last couple of decades, by constantly confounding expectations and by daring to tackle weighty Manichean enquiries of embattled light/good and dark/evil.
The chief success of the film is in the way it manages to contort itself away from conventional horror tropes in a way expressly designed to disorient and confuse the audience. So the first hour proceeds as a more orthodox genre piece - a harrowing opening sequence of a bloodied and bruised child fleeing a rundown industrial complex, and the tormented dreams and delusions of the child in a care home thereafter. Fifteen years on, an apparently normal family are slain in cold blood at the breakfast table by a ruthless assassin who we subsequently learn is the young girl Lucie come to wreak her ambiguous vengeance.
Still she is possessed by terrifying visions of a monstrous being that compel her to brutal blasts of self-harm. Anna, her friend (and we are lead to believe lover), clings to her conviction of Lucie's victimhood but, like we the audience, cannot help but play host to the doubt that she may in fact be deranged. Gradually though we come to realise that the demon possessing Lucie is the psychological manifestation of an extreme guilt harboured for failing to help another young girl escape her torture 15 years previously, and for which the slaughter of the family (presumably the perpetrators) is her attempt at atonement.
It is this deconstruction of our formal belief systems regarding victimhood that resonates so powerfully for contemporary society, with the Yewtree investigations and the Rotherham sex gangs being such pertinent issues. So quick and adeptly are we to claim the role of victim for ourselves and our own misfortunes, but so equally swift to admonish those that may have a more legitimate and needful stake to the claim.
It is around the hour mark that the film begins to diverge away from this more familiar territory, as Anna is taken prisoner by a mysterious sect led by Mademoiselle who reveals to her their real intent. They seek to administer periods of methodical and systematic suffering to their victims in the hope of eventually cultivating their 'transfiguration' and making them a martyr.
The term 'martyr' derives from the Greek word meaning 'witness', and as Mademoiselle explains to Anna, 'martyrs survive pain, survive total deprivation. They bear all the sins of the mortal world, they give themselves up, they transcend themselves.' Upon achieving this transcendence through extreme suffering they might just glimpse through to 'the other side' and in so doing perhaps obtain the fundamental truths behind our very existence.
Accordingly, Anna passes through various stages of rebellion, despair and insanity to an eventual state of complete dehumanisation, her own self having been decidedly eroded. She is kept alive and beaten by anonymous operatives who proceed with a workman-like efficiency devoid of sadism, instead acting in the vein of Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' dictum.
It is at this point that audience members will enter an internal wrestling bout with the film. Although the first act surpasses any of the 'Saw' or 'Hostel' gore-fests, it does so in a more familiarly squeamish manner. By contrast, the second act's relentless envelope-pushing in terms of documenting pain as a means of empirical investigation is a deviation into jarring, and purposely alienating, moral terrain.
Of course, what imbues the film with its legitimacy in my view and prevents it from appearing exploitative or flippant, is the historical nature of martyrdom and the all-too-recent examples of pain deployment in the name of some higher cause that continue to disturb our collective sensibilities.
Traditionally, martyrs were deemed to be holy and held in high regard by their followers for 'bearing witness'. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Christians were martyred for their faith by public burning by the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th and 17th centuries; and of course, the most famous martyr of all is Jesus Christ, the emblems of whose pain and suffering stare you in the face almost the instance you enter a church.
But it would be an error, as Mademoiselle tells Anna, to regard martyrs as an exclusively religious phenomenon. During the Holocaust, Drs. Mengeles and Rascher conducted twisted pseudo-scientific experiments on camp inmates such as exposing them to extreme temperatures and altitudes, performing transplants and vivisections, and using them as guinea pigs for a whole host of poisons, gases and other medical drugs. This was carried out with the same cold and calculated obedience as is portrayed in the film, with the deluded aim of attaining greater knowledge through others' suffering leading to some kind of enlightenment.
Consider as well, Unit 731 which was a covert research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. Between 3,000 - 12,000 people (mostly Chinese) were systematically killed in experiments involving amputations, deprivation and biological weaponry. (As a side note, after the Imperial Army surrendered, the American government assisted them in covering up these wretched atrocities in exchange for the research data which they deemed to be of value in their on-going conflict with the Russians...)
The communistic social experiments of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot that claimed the lives of untold millions throughout the 20th century, also indicate a despotic authority ruthlessly engineering progressive policies that were designed so that the stated aims would justify the harsh means by which they had to be employed.
Look as well, at how humans have long utilised animals as a means of testing whole pharmacies of drugs and other products that aim to further our scientific understanding and subsequent enrichment of life.
Anna, once broken down fully and flayed alive by a surgeon, begins to transcend her physical reality in a wonderful '2001'-esque sequence gazing briefly through some mystic portal, that cosmic dimension which we all may eventually traverse. Similar to '2001', Laugier closes the film with an ambiguity that throws up a myriad of theories and conjecture - Mademoiselle, having had Anna's insight imparted to her, chooses to commit suicide, telling the congregation of her organisation to "keep doubting".
Perhaps Anna relays the fact that there really is nothing on the other side, that all her searching has been in vain; or perhaps she is told of the eternal damnation that awaits her for her crimes. Personally, I like to think that she was told of something so beyond the realms of our earthly comprehension, something either so sublime, evil or alien that she was simply not able to continue living a human existence in the full consciousness of such a revelation.
In the end this is, I believe, the film's overarching message; whatever it is that lies beyond, whatever can or cannot be attained through martyrdom, it is simply not knowledge to which we should be privy, we are mentally ill-equipped to fathom the boundless possibilities of whatever lies beyond this world and so indeed we are compelled, for the sake of our own humanity, to keep doubting.
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