September 10, 2008: Martyrs
Midnight Madness runs every night at the Toronto International Film Festival. There’s always at least one gore-fest for the raging crowd of midnight moviegoers. Saw and Hostel both showed up here before they hit the mainstream theatres. Last year, a French movie called A L’Interieur pushed boundaries with a crazy woman (played by Beatrice Dalle, no less) stalking another woman and trying to (literally) steal her unborn baby. According to the official write-ups, Martyrs would make A L’Interieur seem like a walk in the park. Gotta see it to believe it.
What follows is some detailed description of the plot, which I present in this case due to the unlikelihood of many readers actually seeing the film. Possible spoilers ahead.
Martyrs is about a couple of girls, one of whom is haunted by visions of someone stalking her and beating her up – this manifests itself by the physical reality of her injuring herself. Her friend is supportive but doesn’t understand the core terror, or how she came to live this way.
The girls track down who they think is the demon in the one girl’s head terrorizing her. This demon turns out to be another abused woman, who they discover in a torture chamber in a secluded suburban house. Some battling ensues in the house and ultimately, the haunted girl finds peace in the only way the terrorized ever seem to do it in the movies. With her out of the picture, that leaves only the second girl, who is captured when the nasty homeowners arrive on the scene.
It turns out that what this team of nasties has been trying to do for a long time is to take people to the edge of death and slightly beyond it, so that the “martyrs” (i.e. victims) can explain what the experience of death is like. This involves a long period of captivity, violence, healing, more violence, abuse and spirit-breaking, and finally the gore set-piece which everyone is waiting for. As a concept, it is effective. As a movie effect, it doesn’t quite convince. That said, the ending is satisfying, with the appropriate bad guys dying in appropriate ways, with some quiet introspection on the part of the big baddie at the time of her death, rather than the over-the-top skewering often seen in such flicks.
I wouldn’t say that the gore and violence factor was necessarily greater than A L’Interieur, but the emotion and intensity of what’s happening certainly is.
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