Martyrs

blog length’d thoughts on Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs

If Helen taught me anything it was this: life is horror. It can be other things too—but in between all those other things; Happy Hour at the Catacombs, Knut Hamsun novels, Twilights Zone 4^th of July TV Marathons, feeding my cat, Free Comic Book Days at the Time Warp or the general comfort that comes from the fact that science has already discovered a consistently effective cure for the clap, there is always the horror.  
              Even when you’re not thinking about it, it never goes away.

And fuck Pascal Laugier for fucking reminding me of that! I haven’t seen every horror movie ever made, but I’ve seen a lot of them. After all the shit I went through during/ post the end of my relationship with Helen, I find the genre infallibly soothing.

                          Unless I’m watching a movie like Martyrs.

The last time I can remember being this fucked up after watching a horror movie I was 12 years old and had just seen A Nightmare On Elmstreet at the theater with a bunch of friends. All those goddamn boiler room and empty school hallway scenes were bad enough, but when that dirty sweater wearing monster  was walking down a dark alley in that one scene, the one where he makes his arms go all Plastic Man and stretch out so they scraped his goddamned knife-claws across the side walls of the super-wide alley,

                                                                   I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT!

“That’s insane!” My pre-Helen-meeting 12 year old little brain screamed. “How the fuck does that get to be fair?! He’s already got knifes all over his fingers and can kill us when we’re sleeping, why all of a sudden does he get to make his arms stretch out all ridiculously wide and shit too?!”

I was so terrified by the whole thing that I didn’t go to school the next day. I faked a stomach ailment and waited for my mom to go to work, after which I spent the next nine or ten hours huddled in the corner of my bedroom with my little brother’s He-Man action figures spread around the floor in some lame-assed formation that I pretended might act as a sort of protective circle. And I sat there, dramaticly protected by action figures, trying my 12 year old best not to go mad.

After watching Martyrs for the first time last week I had a similar reaction. I didn’t go to work for three days. I stayed home instead, racked full of xanex and almost smoking cigarettes, watching re-runs of Deadliest Catch while trying like hell for some reason to avoid making eye contact with the microwave oven, trying ocasionally from time to time to calm down.

Here it is: the thing that makes Martyrs a million times more terrifying than Nightmare is the fact that the horror in Martyrs  doesn’t revolve around a make believe monster in a dirty sweater making its way from one blood bath to the other while croaking out bad puns. Martyrs is about real things. The sort of horrible things that really exist out there, those spooky terrible things that human beings are capable of doing to each other for various un-reconcilable reasons. It’s a bit like the original Wicker Man, except that at no time whatsoever during this movie do any of the main or minor characters involved ever break spontaneously into dance and/or song.

Would you like to be disturbed? If you would, then I promise this movie will disturb the shit out you. You know why?

Because Martyrs is real!

I mean, it’s not a fucking documentary. But it could be. To go into any sort of detailed review of this movie would involve giving away the cool plot twist and the ending. Which I don’t want to do. I can say this without giving away too much, it starts out as a revenge flick. A young girl escapes from some sort of creepy building where someone’s been torturing the living shit out of her.

The little girl survives and gets sent to an orphanage. A bunch of years later she’s managed to track down the people that fucked her up and with the help of one of her friends she sets out on getting her revenge.

The entire thing flips sideways from there though. But trust me, it’s great. The writings great. The directing is great. The acting’s top notch.  It’s crazy. Martyrs somehow manages to be one of the most disturbing things ever put down on film and at the same time, a beautiful thing.

It’s like Rosemary’s Baby meets Hostel Pt 2. Meets getting fucked over by Helen meets a free 12 month supply of Costco brand steak knives . Meets those fucking bicycling fuckers who haunt the side streets of Boulder in their neon-pelvic bone-showing-off-protruding-meat suits meets that bloated camera whore douchebag otherwise known as the present day Ryan O’Neal.

The ending of Martyrs is literally one of the best horror movie endings ever put on screen.  When it was over I was so fucking nervous I vowed never to watch this damn movie again. But I did anyway. And then I watched it again. And then I took it back to the video store, thinking that I was finally done with it. But I wasn’t. A couple of days later I rented it again. I can’t stop myself. I’m a sadistic bastard maybe. I mean, it disturbs the fuck out of me, but I can’t stop watching it. It’s a horrible thing, but you know, at least it’s (it's=the movie) honest.

It reminds me a little bit of how I can’t stop loving Helen.

But let’s not go getting into all that right now.

To sum it all up: If you’re looking for a smart, professionally shot horror movie that will give you nightmares for almost a week, and that’s also in French with English subtitles, then Martyrs, my friends, is for you.

Sincerely,

Get in the car, Helen