I tried to watch Martyrs last night with Jess, and I actually couldn't finish it. It was hyped up to me beforehand in vague emphatics by one of my bosses from work; she apparently had trouble eating afterwards, and then even had nightmares. I know Gemma isn't that easy to scare so on that recommendation, I got Jess to acquire it before I got there.
What followed was not pleasant, but was well within acceptable horror limits and it didn't test my limits more than, say, The Descent or Eden Lake, both great modern horrors that masterfully used tension and gore. This, however, was something else. I'll detail what I remember of the plot below, in an effort to try and chase the haunting imagery of it away. I'll spoilerise it so that people who just want to watch a good new horror can accept the advice of the thread and watch it without the effect being lost. Spoiler
The set up of the film is grim and it soon gets much worse. It starts with an escaping pre-teen girl (Lucie) who has been chained up in a disused abbatoir for god knows how long. She's been living sat on a hard chair with a hole cut in it, with a bucket underneath to catch her waste. The girl hasn't been raped, we're informed, though she's been thoroughly and systematically neglected and brutalised. We see "stock footage" of this girl in a home, we see her making a friend (Anna) and eventually being terrorised by a supernatural force; a monstrous ghoul-girl who mutilates her horribly then disappears when people turn up to save her.
The film then skips forward in time, this girl and her now girlfriend Anna are tracking down the people that did those horrible things to her. A family starts their breakfast in a typical way; the brother and sister tease each other, the parents talk about how the pool they're building is coming along and soforth. The doorbell goes and the dad goes to answer the door. Lucie, the abused girl, shoots the dad with a shotgun. She moves into the kitchen and blows away the mother too. She asks the son if he knows what his parents did; he clearly doesn't, but after a moment of internal conflict, she blows him away. She tracks down the daughter, who is hiding under her bed. She shoots through the bed and has to reload to finish the child off.
Lucie then phones Anna, who comes and is naturally horrified by the scene. She says that they'll have to clean the house and hide the bodies. They move the bodies to the downstairs bathroom and while Lucie is alone upstairs, she is attacked once more by the ghoul. She tries to fight her off, but the ghoul hacks into her with a straight razor. Anna comes to the rescue and treats her wounds. While Lucie is sleeping it off, Anna drags the corpses into the hole that's already been dug for the pool. When she goes back for the mother, the mother comes around. She asks Anna why Lucie did these things, and Anna tries to rescue her. Lucie realises what's happening and brutally murders the mother with a hammer with cinematography reminiscent of Irreversible.
Soon after, the ghoul appears and appears to hug Lucie. We see Lucie's past, back in the abbattoir, when she escaped and saw in another filthy room, an older woman who was chained up like her. Young Lucie leaves the horribly scarred woman behind, the poor woman can't even speak in language, she can only wail. The ghoul then cuts along present Lucie's arms, Anna sees Lucie doing it to herself, and it becomes clear to the viewer (though to be honest, this twist was pretty predictable) that the ghoul is the woman Lucie left behind, her guilt driving her to self-mutilate. She soon dies and Anna is left alone in the house.
Anna phones her mother, desperate to talk to someone. Her mother gives her shit over her girlfriend and proceeds to rant. The hammer that Lucie used to bash in the skull of the mother falls off a side shelf. Anna, crying, goes to retrieve it and shifts a couch or cupboard or something to get to it. Behind that is a little room. In the centre of the room is a trap door that Anna pulls open and lets down a ladder. She heads down.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but right around here, after all the stylised, filmic story, something felt wrong. I won't use the word "realistic" because the film still felt artificial, but something triggered that sense of unease I had when the news was full of Josef Fritzl and his under-house dungeon, which hit the airwaves a year after this film came out.
She explores the dungeon beneath the house and foul images of horribly tortured people adorn the otherwise stylish, hygeinically clean walls on movie-poster esque lit frames. The photos shown I'm pretty sure were real. Worst of all, Hell help me, one was of a malnourished baby. It wasn't on screen for too long, but long enough to burn into my brain and randomly haunt me afterwards.
Moving on, she finds the woman that Lucie left behind. She's haunted my thoughts since. Obviously, she's not real, what happened to her wasn't real, but it's so vile what was done to her and what could hypothetically be done to any person by any other person willing to do it. Her body was horribly emaciated and lacerated, but she had a mask, a blindfold surgically grafted on to her face. Anna releases her and shows her tenderness and care.
Just the thought of that terrible fucking contraption really got to me. Screwed and riveted into your skull when you're at your most vulnerable, taking your sight away, so you can't even tell where the abuse is coming from or when it will come. My god, so fucking awful. The poor woman claws at it, unable to remove it once she's freed from her chains; she can't move it because it's fucking riveted to her bones.
Anna tries to help her, gets a screwdriver to pull out the rivets, she bathes the woman and cleans her wounds. The woman, on seeing what she's become, she tries to hack off her own arm. She bangs her head on the wall to kill herself while doing that wordless moan. She's then abruptly shot dead by a mysterious group of people in black, who, thankfully, threw me back into "I am watching a movie" mode, rather than fixating on the suffering of a plausible hypothetical woman. Then, as the "Mademoiselle" character explained their group's insane purpose of trying to find out what was on the other side by creating "martyrs", I no longer cared about the plot but seriously wanted to avoid seeing more suffering, and it was as clear as day that the film was going to try and save the worst for last.
Jess was reacting in a similar way to myself so we decided to stop it and watch Clerks 2 to try and chase the bad thoughts away. It was weird, but we both felt like we shouldn't have been watching it and I didn't want to disturb her anymore and that justified my rising sense of unease and concern. I've noticed that I seem to feel more emotional in response to films when I'm with her, and with it being hyped up beforehand, perhaps that's what really got to me, but yeesh. Definitely the worst I've ever been made to feel by a horror film. The director is probably a genius and possibly mentally ill.
EBC|Fucking Metal|Artist|Androgynous Sexfiend|Gozer Kvltist|
Listen to my music! http://www.soundclick.com/nihilanth "America is, now, the most powerful and economically prosperous nation in the country." - Master of Ossus
Damn, another one disturbed by Martyrs. Almost my thoughts exactly. Also, good you didn't see it's end. "Uber-torture-core", as some say, it's just that and nothing more.
Now, it's still not as hard-hitting as some real stories about people tortured to the death by maniacs in gruesome fashion; but for a fictional story it's all too disturbing. It's definetely not a horror, because what you feel is certainly not fear - it's a vomit movie of sorts.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...
...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
What differentiates it from other popular tortureporn shit-movies that I find to be total crap but nonetheless attracts a large following of horror-lovers, a lot of which are disturbingly female moviegoers?
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
For most who had seen it (until the end) and commented favourably, it's the completely awful plot culmination, which offers a bizzare (and quite vomit-inducing, too) rationale for torture sort of different from all other torture-porn movies. It's the most hardcore torture movie from the tortureporn of the recent years, and it's uncanny end logic does somewhat set it apart.
I don't know what else one can say, really. It's a bad movie anyhow - I see no reason to create fictional stories meant to deal extreme psychological trauma to the viewers by depicting heights of suffering, and I see that as morally wrong, even if it's made for the kinda masochistic horror viewers. But then, my opinion is that if there's a certain horror genre that's meant to scare and another, different one that is meant to traumatize, Martyrs is probably the only movie which can belong in the latter category.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...
...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
I'm glad I don't watch horror movies. Reading Rye's description made me want to puke. How can anyone get jollies out of that sort of movie?
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
Surlethe wrote:I'm glad I don't watch horror movies. Reading Rye's description made me want to puke. How can anyone get jollies out of that sort of movie?
It's not about "jollies" anymore than the torture scenes of Nineteen Eighty-Four are. It's not a film made to be enjoyed as entertainment, it's designed to repulse and disturb. In many ways, whereas "Hostel" and "Saw" made torture porn boring and mediocre with pacifying humour and increasingly contrived soap opera plot, this is its opposite, and has the same lofty progressive French aims to bring home some of the darkness of the human experience as "Irreversible". It's also pretty original, scarily close to some real life events of late, and painstakingly constructed to keep the viewer uncomfortable and vulnerable.
I think it accomplished that no problem, I've never been so fucked by a film and had become pretty jaded. This let me know I have my mainstream horror limits after all.
EBC|Fucking Metal|Artist|Androgynous Sexfiend|Gozer Kvltist|
Listen to my music! http://www.soundclick.com/nihilanth "America is, now, the most powerful and economically prosperous nation in the country." - Master of Ossus
I guess I should recommend this movie to some of my friends who get off on those stupid lame ass horror movies.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
Surlethe wrote:I'm glad I don't watch horror movies. Reading Rye's description made me want to puke. How can anyone get jollies out of that sort of movie?
Never understood the appeal myself, either. I don't especially enjoy watching people suffer gruesome deaths in film in general (war films, etc.), never mind these sorts of extreme horror films.
Particularly when those works have no plot at all aside from people dying or suffering. At least with war or action films, there's some flimsy plot and a protagonist who overcomes them, and the movie's not just something completely designed to show suffering and shit.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
War films usually show extraordinary resilience of the characters, even if it's a movie about the extremes of suffering (Come and See, for example). They also make a moral point, often. Horror movies usually do not center around resilience of the character; and his or her resilience hardly brings her much in the end, also, modern horror movies rarely make any good moral point at all. The first Saw movie was sort of intriguing at the start, morals-wise, but after that it just went soo downhill.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...
...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
I love horror movies, but I'm not interested in the torture porn subgenre. If it's truly as horrific as you're all saying I might have to watch it based on reputation alone, though.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
adam_grif wrote:I love horror movies, but I'm not interested in the torture porn subgenre. If it's truly as horrific as you're all saying I might have to watch it based on reputation alone, though.
What, to see how nauseating it is? I'd just take everyone's word for it and pass.
"
- PeZook
