“It’s so easy to create a victim, young lady, so easy. You lock someone in a dark room. They begin to suffer. You feed that suffering.”
The first time I saw Martyrs I was swept up by the ever-changing narrative, major genre shifts and character reveals. It helps to balance out all the torture porn, which gets monotonous. Thing is, that’s the point. It’s a torture move that intellectualizes what the most extreme torture can do to the mind instead of focusing on the tearing of flesh, though there’s plenty of that too. This time, knowing what was going to happen lessened the impact of the first half a lot. However, I forgot some important stuff in the middle (involving a 3rd woman/creature that haunts our traumatized victim.) The movie maintains its excitement and fast pace even while moving towards an inevitable grim fate.
It’s a tough movie to evaluate because it’s deeper and smarter than similar fare. The acting is pretty great, even though much of it is performed while screaming hysterically. However, the go-for-broke attitude towards the violence can be a turn off. It’s a similar issue with The Passion of the Christ, a film whose relentless bloodshed was more pointless by comparison. This is one of those Horror films that passes up thrills for true horrific situations, and that’s something I always admire when it works.
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