That's MARTYRS for you -- it's not easy to watch, but if you check it out at the very least the first half will serve up some cool surprises.
MARTYRS is a French production from 2008 about a little girl who escapes from kidnappers who are systematically torturing her seemingly without reason to the safety of an orphanage. There she meets her life-long best friend.
Okay, if you don't want to know any of the film's secrets, stop reading now:
Flash forward several years and we find that this escaped girl (Mylene Jampanoi) has been searching for her tormentors and, in the first of several surprising plot twists, murders what seems to be an every day normal family. Turns out, they're the ones who tortured her. After the killings, she calls her best friend from the orphanage (Morjana Alaoui) to come help her clean up.
Here's another twist: turns out these people are still carrying out indescribable torture in their basement and it isn't long before a girl who has been degraded beyond humanity (Isabelle Chasse) is on the loose.
The final twist? The friend of the original victim ends up captured by a similar family intent on torturing her. Turns out: they're looking to create martyrs who might transcend our existence and see the truth of another dimension (or something) once they've been tortured enough. So far, no one has survived.
So: the movie's not easy to watch. There's lots of gross stuff and tons of human suffering. But, you have to admire the inventiveness of the screenplay. It is never content to go by any kind of recognizable formula, and more than any film I've seen recently, it included surprise after surprise to the point where I had no idea where it was going to go next.
The only downfall of the film is that about halfway through it loses some of its steam. Once Alaoui is captured, most of the surprises have been spent and we're left with plenty of unpleasantness but not much in the way of reasons to keep watching.
Still, if you have to watch one of these torture flicks, at least this one has some ambition and imagination.
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