Pascal Laugier
Martyrs

To witness the Hereafter in life is an experience undertaken by those who, through pain and deprivation, transcend the boundaries of existence and become bearers of the truth. A truth that is a divine vision, a revelation lived in the moment, impossible to decipher or disseminate.

This is the essence of martyrdom, as recalled by the ambitious “Martyrs”, a film of shocking harshness, a new chapter in the history of a genre like horror that, for a long time, seemed to have reached its endpoint. “Martyrs” is a dead-end street, an authentic ordeal that the protagonist Anna experiences firsthand and from which she cannot escape in any way. The only way out of horror is then asceticism, achieved with difficulty after torture, beatings, and ultimately, a flaying that seems to strip the young woman of everything yet gives her the deepest good: the dissolution of the body beyond life and death, ecstasy, union with the absolute. The ending leaves more than one doubt, and the impression is that the interpretative choice equates to a "faith" choice: to believe or not in what Anna has seen, with the risk of questioning the entire experience she has lived... From the macabre waltz of blood, the viewer emerges shaken, disoriented by continuous changes of perspective and fast, disturbing shots that spread an unsettling sense of realism, worthy of the best Nouvelle Vague. The great merit of “Martyrs” perhaps lies precisely in this: in the ability to drag us by the hair and involve us in an exhausting spiral like few others, only to lead us, with expert hand, beyond every earthly dimension, into a parallel world of pure and uncontaminated visions, where the very essence of the moving image is celebrated. Thus, Anna’s ecstatic eye finally becomes ours, an (un)conscious witness to the great martyrdom of cinema.

 
"The world is now made in such a way that there are nothing but victims. Martyrs are very rare; martyrs are something else entirely. The martyr is an exceptional being […] He survives suffering, survives deprivation, takes on the evils of the Earth and surrenders himself. He transcends himself […] he transfigures…"