Lucie In The Sky: Martyrs and the Antithesis of Horror

Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs is a French-Canadian psychological body horror film that nips at the audience’s collective psyche, provoking us, though disgustingly, to ponder what lies beyond death. The film revolves around a runaway and her friend, as they deal with a shadowy corporation and their quest to understand what no one should ever know.

The movie begins with Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) exacting revenge upon what seems to be a normal family, shooting them dead in their own home. Anna (Morjana Alaoui), discovers this, and buries the bodies of the family, silently nodding her head to, whilst accepting to believe Lucie’s convoluted stories of torture and abuse. After Lucie slits her own throat and frees herself from the confines of the past, Anna discovers a torture victim deep beneath the Belfond estate. Realizing that Lucie’s stories were true, Anna attempts to help the tortured girl, only for her to be captured by the enigmatic organization herself.

Martyrs was, undoubtedly, the most intolerable horror film I have ever seen, more so than the Final Destination series, of which I am deathly afraid. A premise that is blood-soaked and riddled with torture always discomforts me, seeing as I find myself more of an enthusiast of psychological horror, the type of horror that really reaps at your psyche like the raven at the chamber door, than that of visual horror. However, this quickness of mine to categorize Martyrs as nothing more than another piece of mainstream “torture-porn,” only bolsters Laugier’s ability to misdirect. Misdirection is, after all, a basic skill any and all horror directors must master in order to truly evoke the emotion of fear.

The film begins most comfortably, inasmuch as watching a little orphan girl get attacked by a dark entity can be called normal. It is here that our minds, desensitized by the many unoriginal and non-frightening horror films, quickly assume that this movie will be another run-of-the-mill ghost haunting story. Thereafter, we are quickly treated to counteractive scenes. After watching a seemingly normal, bourgeois, nuclear family get force-fed lead by a questionable, evidently psychotic girl, we come to the falsified realization that Lucie must be a homicidal maniac and her delusions have led her to project the identities of her past assailants, if there even were any, into a perfectly innocent group of people. She then murders them, reassuring herself and Anna that it was for the sake of justified vengeance, but it is here we think that Lucie is crazy and nothing more. After Anna attempts to save the mother, who was then still alive, Lucie goes completely insane, and we are forced to think that the rest of the movie will be about Anna’s escape from her deranged friend. Every scene following the opener, Laugier has effectively misguided us all through the first half of the film.

After it is revealed that the dark entity was nothing but a figment of Lucie’s imagination, we are then treated to the slow accretion to the film’s true conflict. Lucie, despite being delusional and psychotic, spoke of nothing else but the truth. Anna, a prime example of a woman who is punished because of appeasing her piqued interests and curiosity, as Linda Williams states in her essay “When the Woman Looks,” becomes the next Lucie—a victim of the torture and abuse by a shadowy organization. It is here, at this very moment, that we are treated with the film’s true source of horror—the unknown.

Much likeIt FollowsandPontypool,Martyrstaps into and evokes our ancient, verily human fear of the unknown. However, unlike those two films, the unknown employed by Laugier is what we, as a society, collectively fear— conspiracies that we cannot fathom. Aesthetically, the members of the group are shrouded in literal darkness. We neither see their faces, being marred by a blackened room or cut from the shot, nor learn their names. I believe these torturers are not even morally evil as much as they are devoted to the cause. Their matriarch, simply called Mademoiselle, embodies this worldly secrecy. She is what we fear, and what we fear is happening today—that somewhere in the world, there are people who are pulling the strings, secretly dictating to us how we ought to live; there are people in the world dabbling in what humans must never know, lest they go mad from the revelation; there are people in the world killing incessantly, believing their actions are justified.

You see, the horror genre is no stranger to torture and abuse. Both psychotic killers and homicidal maniacs do so to their innocent victims for laughs and gags, and the occasional fetish. Martyrs, however, presents an organization whose members do so for humanity’s sake. Their prime directive, after all, is to recreate the sublime albeit grim visage of true martyrdom by ceaselessly torturing their victims and learn the secrets that lie beyond death so that they may share the knowledge to the world. This is done so using a framework of brutality that is, as Mademoiselle says, “methodical, systematic, and cold.” When torture and abuse are exacted with a purpose greater than vengeance or pleasure, especially one that appears to be for the good of mankind, they become darker and more gruesome than they already are. With the knowledge that Mademoiselle seeks to uncover, differences would cease to exist—we would all be living one life in preparation for a single afterlife, if there even is any.

Anna’s torture burned quite slowly, and part of me wished that it would end simply because it took too long, not because it was unbearable to watch. Indeed, watching it was a hassle. The torture scene was made more so due to the fact that her torture was a bit mild—a handful of slaps to the face and punches to the gut, as well as being force-fed some gruel. I had anticipated some Saw-level torture, seeing as the other martyrs, as well as the figment of Lucie’s imagination, were depicted with innumerable gashes and leathery skin. Even the woman beneath basement had a helmet bolted to her skull. However, the unhurried nature of her torture was actually necessary for the audience to truly feel what Anna is feeling at that moment—her slow and mild torture was in truth more realistic than many methods of torment and pain.

Once more, Laugier’s expertise in misdirection is accredited—his work is the antithesis of the horror genre itself, which already operates and makes use of antitheses and corruptions of that which is morally good. While many horror films utilize dysphemisms that warp and tarnish the beauty of something good in the world, Laugier labels torture and abuse, two evidently evil and morally wrong actions, as beautiful and necessary for transcendental enlightenment. Due to this euphemistic view of torture and abuse, Martyrs’ filmic value as a horror film and a film per se is extremely high.

In a sick albeit justified sense, Anna is no less than a Christ-like figure. Her life before her transformation is riddled with acts of selflessness—helping the pariah that was the friendless Lucie, to the mother of the family, to even the grotesque and seemingly inhuman creature that lived deep beneath the Belfond estate. She too was undeserving of the torture and abuse, albeit having gone through the worst of them, all for the sake of man. In the end, she is flayed of all flesh, the symbolisms of her Earthly desires and temptations, and reaches the apotheosis of martyrdom, being at the precipice of the light. She is both a victim to the seemingly meaningless albeit truly necessary violence, and a witness, as the final shot of the film asserts, to the unfathomable beyond. By bearing the amoral suffering, Anna was rewarded for the previous look that garnered her punishment—a blessing in disguise. Her Christ-likeness is juxtaposed to Mademoiselle, whose raison d’être is to unravel the otherworldly secrets via purposeful torment.

After hearing the whispers of Anna, we are then treated to a meeting of the Mademoiselle’s proletariat colleagues, presumed to be high-ranking officials in the same shadowy corporation. As they wait for their matriarch to disclose the secrets of the afterlife, they are left to “keep doubting,” killing herself immediately after the revelation—what Anna had said was either too beautiful or too horrible to hear. It was either there was indeed an afterlife, or there was none, or the afterlife that they all believed to be true was nothing more than a Hellish pit that both the benevolent and malevolent were subjected to, or that it was indeed something of ethereal beauty. Regardless, the afterlife can never be interpreted by a finite being, and even if Anna stood in the limbo between life and death, even she could not truly experience the beauty/horror of the afterlife, being still tethered to the mortal realm. This ending is marvelous, seeing as we are left to interpret ourselves what the afterlife is like. This resonates with the teachings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose phenomenology is surmised in the sentence, “we will never truly know.”

Martyrs begs the question, “are we, in essence, torturing ourselves in the pursuit of life after death?” Staying fit by subjecting ourselves to fad diets and exercising for days on end, eliminating disease by chugging handful after handful of drugs, pitting ourselves against the elements, and playing God—are these just fancy ways in which we do not the inevitability of death? Perhaps, perhaps not, but as gruesome as the film was, Martyrs did an excellent job in reminding the audience of hope. Anna fought and tugged on the chains, and slowly, gave in her torment all because of Lucie’s voice reminding her that “it’ll all be okay.” Perhaps we can learn a thing or two about acceptance from Anna, who never gave up holding on to the light, even if it meant accepting the fate that she was currently in.

I give it a 5/5.