Martyrs

Movie
German title	Martyrs
Original title	Martyrs
Country of production	France , Canada
original language	French
Publishing year	2008
length	95 minutes
Age rating	FSK unchecked ; SPIO / JK : criminally harmless
Rod
Director	Pascal Laugier
script	Pascal Laugier
production	Richard Grandpierre , ; Simon Trottier
music	Alex Cortés , ; Willie Cortés
camera	Stéphane Martin , ; Nathalie Moliavko-Visotzky
cut	Sébastien Prangère
occupation
	Morjana Alaoui : Anna; Mylène Jampanoï : Lucie (adult); Jessie Pham : Lucie (as a child); Catherine Bégin : Elderly woman; Robert Toupin : the father; Patricia Tulasne : Gabrielle; Juliette Gosselin : Marie; Xavier Dolan : Antoine;

Martyrs is a French horror film from 2008. So far it has only been shown in cinemas in Germany at the Fantasy Filmfest on August 19, 2008. A release in Germany on DVD took place on April 1, 2009 for video rental shops. There is no publication on Blu-ray or as a purchase medium in Germany, but they are available in Austria. The German rights are owned by Autobahn , a sub-label of Senator Entertainment . The uncut publication received the SPIO / JK approval in Germany with the addition of no criminal liability .

action

In 1971 a girl named Lucie was picked up by the police near an industrial area. As you can see in a well-rehearsed inspection of the crime scene, she was held in a small room for several years, but was able to escape. However, she is disturbed and withdrawn so that she does not give any more precise information about her experiences. She only talks to her friend Anna, with whom she grows up together in an orphanage.

Fifteen years later, Lucie believes she recognized her tormentors in a newspaper article and goes to the house where the family lives. She shoots the family of four with a shotgun. Then Lucie calls her friend Anna, who is already waiting for Lucie's call. Lucie should just observe the family itself and clarify whether it is the right family. Looking back, a memory from Lucie, it becomes clear that the mother of the family beat her and kept her in the industrial area. Anna has the address given to her, but when she is in the forest in front of the house, the injured Lucie runs into her arms, who - in her hallucination - is attacked by a grotesque, emaciated and severely disfigured female figure that she thinks of a woman that she saw during her escape but that didn't help her.

When Anna throws the bodies into a hole in the garden, she notices that her mother, Gabrielle, survived badly injured. Anna therefore tries to help her escape. Lucie sees this and kills Gabrielle with a hammer, who is responsible for much of the suffering she has suffered. When that doesn't calm her hallucination, Lucie cuts her throat.

The next day Anna happened to find a secret passage in the house that led to an underground cellar prison, where a severely malnourished and cut-strewn woman, just like Lucie, was held captive by the former residents of the house. She brings them upstairs, bathes them, and removes the metal construct that covers the eyes and has been nailed to the head with staples . Then Anna falls asleep, crouching next to the dead Lucie lying on the couch, who she has hugged before.

She wakes up the next day because the rescued woman makes moaning noises as she tries to cut her wrist. When Anna tries to stop her, the woman is shot by the leader of an armed group in black who suddenly storms the house and takes Anna to the cellar prison.

A small table and two chairs are set up in the basement, and after being forced to sit down, an older, eccentric-looking lady appears, who explains to Anna that Lucie was a “victim” who only got away at the time because of the organization was still too disorganized. The victims are locked up, experience trauma and see things in their imaginations, like Lucie a dead woman who wanted to inflict pain on her or cockroaches crawling over you like the woman Anna found. In a small booklet, the elderly woman Anna shows the pictures of martyrs or Lingchi victims who “transcend” and who were all still alive when the pictures were taken. The lady instructs Anna to look into the eyes of the martyrs. She explains that martyrs have nothing to do with religion, but that these people are special and not victims of which the world is otherwise only; that they had even tried it with children, but that young women were most likely to have shown themselves to be amenable to the spiritual transformation of an authentic martyrdom. Those of a selfless nature who - once broken - indifferently endure any suffering through complete self-surrender, until their soul leaves the body at a certain point and enters the hereafter, although their body is still alive. So if you were able to bring such a person back from this state, you would be able to tell about the afterlife. After the woman leaves, Anna is drugged.

Then Anna's “preparation” for her encounter with death is shown in rapid leaps in time, during which she is chained in the empty, sealed off and quite dark room by the new residents of the house, gradually shaved, force-fed and repeatedly beaten to the point of unconsciousness. During the attacks, the tormentors did not speak a word to Anna. The memory of Lucie telling her how she thinks fear goes away makes her fearless. After she is finally broken mentally and physically, she is skinned alive. She then actually has a vision and, with the last of her strength, announces her impressions to the called older woman in an inaudible whisper.

The members of the organization that is doing these experiments then arrive at the house from many countries to find out what Anna has seen, as she is the first of the four survivors to have told her stories. While the people in the foyer wait for the older woman to tell them about it, a man knocks on the bathroom door with the older woman in there to pick her up. After a long conversation through the closed door, the elderly woman says, “Do you know what comes after death? Doubt! ”. She then puts a revolver in her mouth and pulls the trigger to commit suicide.

The last scene shows the lexical definition of martyr : nom, adjectif; du grec "marturos": témoin (in the German subtitles: noun; from Greek "marturos": witness ). Finally, the deceased Anna is shown again as a child.

Reviews

Wolf Speer from Filmstarts.de calls the film "one of the most important and best of the year". It would "trigger bitter discussions" and show "something that we are guaranteed to have never seen".

Janosch Leuffen from Blairwitch.de says: Martyrs “don't let go of your nerves even after the credits”. [...] "The final punch [will] leave their mouths open even [those] who like Lucie and Anna have persevered painfully to the bitter end."

“The extremely harsh psychological thriller explores the lines of violence that are repeatedly pushed back in recent French genre films. Despite the shock effects sought, a psychologically largely well thought-out study of violence and its devastating consequences. "

- Lexicon of international film

Discussion in France

French horror films (e.g. Inside , Frontier (s) or High Tension, which was confiscated in Germany in its abridged version ) have recently become famous for offering excessive depictions of violence. In France it was approved from 18, which is not the case with most horror films, since cinemas and free TV are then not allowed to show the films. The French Minister of Culture Christine Albanel then had a new examination carried out, whereupon a release from 16 was obtained.

useful information

The film is dedicated to the Italian film author and director Dario Argento .

Martyrs was indexed on list A by the Federal Testing Office for Media Harmful to Young People (BPjM) in July 2012 . Most of the restrictions resulting from this, however, were already subject to the film when it was released with the SPIO / JK seal of “criminal law harmless”, which attests that it is a serious threat to young people. However, of the three examples mentioned above, Martyrs is the only film that was published in Germany in full.

The band Paradise Lost adapted a scene from the film in their video for the song "Faith Divides Us - Death Unites Us" from the album of the same name from 2009 and clearly referred to it in its text.

Remake

The German filmmaker Daniel Stamm announced in 2011 that he wanted to make an American remake , under the direction of Temple Hill and Morgan White. Mark L. Smith rewrote the original screenplay by Pascal Laugier. The film was ultimately directed by Kevin and Michael Goetz and was shown at various film festivals in October 2015.