I Would Like to See It: Martyrs (Patreon)

Tonally, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs is one of New French Extremity’s most pronounced oddities. What begins as a grindhouse revenge flick veers into cheesy Saw-esque torture theatrics and ends, after another sharp left turn, in a sort of Twilight Zone chin-scratcher. On a structural level the film’s willingness to continue zigging where it might reasonably be expected to zag provides a handful of minor thrills, but the visual language with which it engages the nested depravities at its core is sterile, bureaucratic, and tedious in the extreme. Locker rooms and clinics without even the urban decay of the Saw flicks to lend a little texture blur together seamlessly, coming hard on the heels of a few cut-and-paste institutional sets and an equally unimpressive suburban home.

Perhaps the film’s most interesting element is the brief scene of troubled domestic mundanity that opens its second act as we glimpse the inner workings of a seemingly ordinary family. An absentminded father blithely ignoring his wife’s verbal and emotional abuse of their son, a sibling rivalry poisoned by parental manipulation. It’s a look into the banal beating heart of Martyrs, the kind of acid-edged suburban idyll that is the stock in trade of directors like David Lynch — whose astronomically superior engagement with the same ideas does Laugier’s flick no favors — and a moment of real and recognizable human connection. The gore that follows is bracing, if a little silly, and the act is often derailed by a heavy-handed visual metaphor for trauma on which Martyrs leans too heavily and too frequently.

The film’s central idea is enchantingly repellent: what if every cruel, demented thing human beings did to one another had a purpose? That the violence itself is fairly unimaginative deflates the thrill of it somewhat, but Martyrs does come closest to the transcendence it chases when it depicts Anna (Morjana Alaoui) experiencing an ecstatic vision of the afterlife in the throes of being flayed alive. The harsh white light and intense focus on Anna’s ravaged face achieves for a single moment what the rest of the film flails at without much connection: the idea that violence done over time is a transformative experience. Too bad it only lasts about three seconds.