Martyrs throws credibility to the winds about the time Anna (Morjana Alaoui), having witnessed her best friends suicide, decides against fleeing the scene and is captured by the mysterious group that owns the house. The rest of the film is a succession of scenes where Anna is brutalised by the gang, for reasons that only become clear in the finale. If you saw Martyrs on the big screen, these scenes were met with long sighs by audience members who, having already watched a family being killed in cold blood, now had to endure seemingly endless scenes of a woman being beaten and humiliated. Surely there was some payoff, some kind of insight that all of this unpleasantness was supposed to deliver? Well sort of. You see, the torturers belong to a covert group seeking to discover the truth about life after death, and only prolonged suffering will allow a person to glimpse the afterlife. The victim has to be female because young women are the most susceptible, an explanation that most Torture Porn films wouldnt dare attempt.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
