Martyrs (2008)

Pascal Laugier's Martyrs arrives with years of notoriety attached to it, and the reputation holds. A girl escapes a slaughterhouse, grows up, kills a family she believes responsible, and is then, along with her friend Anna, delivered into the hands of a secret society that tortures young women in the hope of producing a martyr who can report back from the afterlife. It is a grim, airless piece of work, and it means every minute of it.

The two leads, Morjana Alaoui and Mylène Jampanoï, were cast for their intensity and their darkness, not to make a point. The film belongs to women and to their suffering, but its questions are theological and existential, not political. There is no critique of patriarchy here, only a cult of pain. A single kiss between Anna and Lucie reads as desperate intimacy, not as an exploration of identity. Race, climate, class, bodily self-acceptance, neurodivergence: none of these concerns appear. The bodies on screen are emaciated, stapled, flayed, offered up as instruments of horror. Body positivity has no purchase in a film where the flesh is the site of the wound.

What keeps the film from sermonizing is its refusal to explain itself. Laugier has spoken of a world under the reign of money, but that idea never makes it into the frame. The film offers imagery instead of argument, and the imagery is Catholic, severe, and unconsoling. The final whisper is withheld from us, which is the correct decision. A lesser film would have told us what Anna saw. We are left with a table, a catatonic woman, and home movies of two children who did not deserve any of this. The classification is straightforward: a serious film about pain, with almost no interest in the cultural preoccupations of the present moment. It simply wants to hurt you, and it succeeds on its own austere terms.

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