Martyrs

Martyrs is two films bolted together, and the join is the most violent thing about it.

The first is a revenge film that curdles. Lucie, who escaped an unexplained captivity as a child, walks into a suburban house fifteen years later and kills the family she believes were her captors, with her friend Anna cleaning up behind her. It is shot like a home invasion and it is genuinely shocking, partly because the film declines to confirm she has the right house. Lucie is also being hunted by something that is not there, and the film's handling of that figure — self-harming, silent, relentless — is the best work in it.

Then, around forty minutes, the film kills its protagonist and starts again. What follows is an hour of systematic, procedural torture in a basement, administered by a secret society in pursuit of a theological outcome.

It is not a torture film, which is why it is worse

The crucial thing about the second half is that nobody enjoys it. There is no sadist. Mademoiselle, played with appalling calm by Catherine Bégin, is an administrator running a research programme: she believes that sustained suffering can push a young woman past a threshold into transfiguration, at which point she will be able to report what is on the other side of death. The violence is scheduled. There is a technician. Meals are provided.

That is the film's argument and it is the only reason the second half functions as anything but endurance. Laugier is not asking whether you can stand it. He is asking what you would do with an afterlife you could confirm, and answering: this.

Whether it is worth it

I think so, narrowly, and I would not recommend it to most people. The craft is real — the structure is audacious, Morjana Alaoui's performance in the back half is extraordinary and almost entirely physical, and the final ten minutes are among the most formally beautiful in the genre. It also has nothing resembling a reason to be watched twice.

The 2015 American remake removes the theology and is therefore pointless. If you want the register without the basement, Possession is bleaker in a way that does not require a stomach, and Tender Is the Flesh does something comparable in prose.

The short answer: Anna is flayed alive and survives into a transfigured state. Mademoiselle arrives, Anna whispers something to her, and Mademoiselle writes it down. Before the society's assembled members can hear the report, Mademoiselle shoots herself. Her last instruction to her second is a single word: doubt. The film ends without ever telling you what Anna saw.

What does Anna whisper?

The film does not say and this is not an oversight. We see the whisper and we see its effect, and the effect is suicide. Laugier has been explicit in interviews that the content is deliberately withheld, and the structure makes the reason clear: any specific revelation would be smaller than the question.

What does "keep doubting" mean?

Mademoiselle's last words to Étienne are an instruction to the whole society. Three readings hold.

Anna described nothing. There is no afterlife, the programme has murdered dozens of girls for nothing, and Mademoiselle cannot live with having been wrong — so she tells the others to doubt because doubt is the only honest position left.

Anna described something unbearable. Not absence but a worse presence. On this reading "doubt" is mercy: she is sparing them a certainty she cannot survive.

Anna described paradise. Mademoiselle kills herself to get there immediately, and tells the others to doubt so that they do not all follow and so the work continues.

The film supports all three equally, which is the point of ending on a word rather than a sentence.

What is the creature haunting Lucie?

The emaciated, self-harming figure that attacks Lucie is the girl she abandoned when she escaped — the one she left chained. It is guilt with a body. The film makes this explicit when Anna finds that girl's remains, and the figure stops appearing once Lucie is dead, which is the only mercy anybody in this film receives.

Did Lucie kill the right family?

The film says yes, and makes you wait an hour to be sure. Anna discovers the basement, the equipment and the surviving captive in the house Lucie chose. The revenge was accurate. It was also, in the film's accounting, completely irrelevant — the family were employees.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean. This is the hardest-scoring film in the index and the numbers are the warning.

On tone, Martyrs ranks first among our films. Only 2 works in the whole index score lower and neither is a film — one is a novel, The Girl Next Door, and one is a record, Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. There is no relief, no humour, no survivor, and no consolation of any kind. This is the floor of what we score.

Viscera 096 is second only to one work in the entire index — 1 scores higher. The violence is extended, procedural and almost entirely practical, including a sustained flaying.

Threat 078 is the human end. 90 works score lower. Nothing supernatural causes any of the harm in this film. Every injury is inflicted by a person with a job.

Pace 062 puts it on the shock side, with 83 works slower — but note how that number conceals the structure. The first forty minutes are fast and the last hour is a slow, static grind.

Reality anchor 025 keeps it grounded — only 12 works score lower. Everything in it could happen, and that is the problem.

On jump scares: a few in the first act and none at all in the second. Nothing in the back half needs one.