MARTYRS

OMG! Oh! My! God!

If there is a movie I recommend people to not watch, it’s this! I was warned to not watch this movie but you know me, yuri would make me walk on fire if it came down to it and so I went and saw the damn movie ‘cause like I said…YURI!

“…”

I will never bat an eye in horror movies anymore! I have seen a lot of Korean and Japanese, JAPANESE gore movies but not a single one holds a candle to this movie!!!! Yes, I will give you a minute to soak that in! It took me years to soak that in! I got this movie in 2010 but I am only blogging about it now, why? Because I was so not ready! I am still not ready and so I am hoping to go all psychological on my mind to get back to a resemblance of normalcy by sharing this movie!

MARTYRS goes down as the No.1 most disturbing movie I have ever seen. And this list includes movies from the likes of Iguchi Noboru and Park Cha-wook! And yet! Even as it is so very very disturbing, it is also one of my favourite horror movies and movies in general too. It isn’t all about gore and horror but the film grips you so tightly, from your mind to your body to your full attention with it’s near perfection execution and legendary acting. The way it was split into two perspectives/focuses with each part focusing on either one of our girls got me all jumpy like I was on drugs or something.

This kind of perception division first OWN’d me in my favourite book ever…Sarah Waters’ FINGERSMITH when the story was told in three different perspectives, one from Sue, the other from Maud (The couples in the book) and the last one kind of joined, even though it was mostly following Sue. And so when MARTYRS pulled this trick on Lucie and Anna, I lost the sane part of my mind that was left over too.

Once again, I take this opportunity to ask you all to turn away from this movie, and if you could from this post too but I know you ain’t gonna so I will at least try to save your sanity by diluting this post to a mere 20% of what the actual movie is like and talk mostly about Lucie and Anna. But then again, I can’t discuss them without going into deeper details so please, for the love of innocence, if you are weak of hear or under 20, please, don’t read.

Still here? Alright then…

Mylène Jampanoï as Lucie	Morjana Alaoui as Anna

 
 

There is a secret organisation that’s been running the most evil of businesses since the middle ages. Their goal? To get someone to the afterlife close enough but not lose them just so they could be told about life after death. Through the years of observation, they had come to a conclusion that stripping a person of their everything…everything! And putting them through the most painful of experiences breaking them both in body and mind to the point of death, was the way to go because in their last moments, people had this look in their eyes…a look of enlightenment but none ever lived through that moment to share their new-found knowledge of the life after this.

Another conclusion was that men gave into their desires too quickly and thus broke before they could ever get anywhere near fruition and so it was down to women. Some were unlucky enough to be grabbed in their child-age and Lucie was one of such unlucky girls. Unlucky? Hmm…maybe not so unlucky because, this is where the movie starts off.

 
 
 
 

  
 
 
 

We begin the movie with Lucie escaping from the organisation as a young girl, who ends up at an orphanage where she grows up. Having been subjected to such horrors and at such a young age, there is no shock in learning that she has been left with a lot of demons to deal with. Haunted by these demons and remembering how physically abused she was while under experimentation, she isolates herself from the other girls, who are understandably scared of her…all except one – Anna.

Despite being shrugged off in the beginning, Anna keeps pestering Lucie until Lucie gives up lets Anna be there to her as her support through her troubled and broken life. Only Anna seems to believe in her when she talks of monsters in the dark out to get her.It’s Anna who finally puts a resemblance of a smile back on Lucie’s face and it’s Anna who stays with her through it all until they are adults…which is when shit really hits the fan!

15 years since the orphanage days, finds Lucie and Anna still together, travelling around, doing detective work as it seems that Lucie finally stumbled upon on the people that might be part of the organisation that screwed her over all those years ago and forced her to live a hellish life because even now, after all these years, Lucie is still haunted!

Which brings me to another of this movie’s greatest points. They executed Lucie’s mentality so perfectly that even no matter how many times I’ve seen this movie, I still can’t decide of Lucie was delusional and was the one harming herself or if it was all real. I mean by the end of the movie I can understand it when people come to the conclusion that it was in fact real but I don’t feel it’s that dry-cut. And watching Anna try her very best to believe in Lucie even as she doesn’t see what Lucie does was just so heart-wrenching. Especially when it came time for her beliefs to be tested when Lucie finally made contact with the man that was partially responsible for all those horrible things done to her and countless other people. That scene at the house meeting between Lucie and the Family will go down in my books as one of the best scenes ever filmed.

 
 
 

  
 

 
 
 
 
 

 

Imagine a very happy family eating breakfast as if we were watching one of those family Disney movies. They are all so very happy and even though there is something underlying there that should point out all the wrongness in this family, you don’t see it at first. We are so easily deceived and it fact I forgot what kind of movie I was watching and truthfully until now in the movie, there hasn’t been that much of horror-worthy scene which is why what happens next, when Lucie comes knocking is so shocking that if there was a smartass out there watching this movie as they ate their meal, they would never finish their food for the rest of the movie, nay, for the rest of the night. What exactly happened? Let me just say that never open your door for anyone during breakfast…on a Sunday morning! Never do it people!

After the Last Breakfast, as Lucie sits waiting for Anna to join her (she had come by herself first) Lucie’s demons come back to haunt her. And she is all alone in this damn house that gave even me the chills. But are they really just Lucie’s demons and just in her own head or are they real? As Lucie tries to run away from the house and it all, she crushes into Anna, who brings her back to the house because they couldn’t just leave after what Lucie had done.

Worst decision ever made in a movie!

 

 
 

As mentioned, Anna and Lucie’s connection is tested at this house, which is the setting for the rest of the movie. After what Lucie had done, and her getting worse, Anna is starts to have doubts and reaching the end of her sanity too. Add in the fact that there was a survivor who planted some seeds of doubt in Anna’s mind before she was finished off, with a seasoning of Anna feelings for Lucie reaching the mouth of the bottle ready to spill over (which they do when she kisses Lucie in the bathroom) and we have a formula for disaster on our hands.

The house screws them over so bad that they even come down to blows and Lucie’s breaking point, which comes…sadly, and partly because of Anna. I think that Lucie finally gave in because she finds out that Anna did not believe her stories all this time. Now granted I think Anna did believe in her at some point but was that really believing or was it love that blinded her? Needless to say, Lucie sees it otherwise and it breaks her in such tiny pieces that she finally gives into all the hurting and despair that has been suffocating her soul all these 17 or so years.

 
 

 

That scene was so heart-breaking and watching Anna afterwards was un-bearable. I think Anna has been living for nothing but Lucie since their meeting as only kids and suddenly having to lose your purpose of living just like that…God! That scene out in the rain rivals Homura’s scream scene that one time she had to kill Madoka to prevent her from turning into a witch at her request. The tears, they couldn’t be stopped! Poor Anna.

At least she got to tell Lucie of her real feelings, even if she did it in the form of a kiss that was given at such an inappropriate time. Seriously though, in a bathroom, with a crying Lucie, being watched by a dead body, whose blood was all over Lucie!?! I guess I can forgive Anna a bit. I mean it’s 15 years of pent up Lucie-hunger so really, I applaud her for holding out this long.

It is when Anna is so broken that all the demons that Lucie spoke of all the time, finally, finally, made themselves known to Anna when it’s already too late. The demons, whose secrets were right in the damn house they were in all this time! Lucie’s haunters were real and Anna finds out first hand when she falls under the clutches of the same evil people that had kidnapped Lucie all those years ago. This is what goes on in part two where we finally get to see exactly what evils those devils were up to when they subject their deeds on poor Anna.

God, just remembering it is making my stomach churn! But whether it was because of her very soul, or Lucie’s influence all these years they’ve been together, or her having lost all meaning for her existence, or maybe it was because Lucie kept coming to her keeping her grounded that sees Anna being the first person to go through the hellish experiments and come back from the brink of death to tell the tale of what Afterlife is like.

You will have to watch the movie yourselves to find out what life after death is. Oh wait, I don’t want you to watch this movie so…don’t! But I know you will not listen any way so…

Martyrs is one of my favourite movies and Lucie and Anna are one of my favourite couples too but this movie is one to watch three times in a life-time at the most. It’s just so…disturbing! I will forever like Anna’s character, they way she was there for Lucie all these years even as Lucie wasn’t the most sane of people, nay, she was far from sane. And yet Anna stayed with her, still loved her until the bitter end. Lucie on the other hand is one of the legendary badass ladies of film to me and she will be remembered as such with the likes of Ripley (Alien) and Sarah (Terminator). She was just so good with that short gun! If this were an anime series, I am pretty sure she would have gotten a spin-off OVA for sure!

Any who, yeah, stay away from this movie if you want to remain blissfully ignorant! Don’t say that I did not warn you as you sit there feeling your soul leave your body!