[Editorial] “Forgive Me”: Remaking Martyrs

Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) is an experience, with the levels of nihilism, violence and despair of the narrative regularly netting it a spot in lists of “most disturbing films”, or “movies you will only watch once”.

This article will contain spoiler-filled discussions of Martyrs (2008) and the remake, Martyrs (2015).

.Included among the films under the banner of the New French Extremity, the genre-spanning, visceral exploration of suffering is a challenging watch, but the film made waves at the Cannes Marché du Film and a further splash on wider release among genre fans. There will be more on the critical response to the film a little later in this article, but it did emerge as a must-watch in terms of being an endurance test for viewers and how much misery they could withstand. The fact that an American remake was considered at all, is surprising, considering the graphic torture scenes and overall tone of the film being about as far away from mainstream Hollywood as you can imagine. While many remakes spark concerns about how the material will be handled, Martyrs felt like a particularly baffling move, with even the boldest Hollywood studio likely being unwilling to match the intensity of the original. A watered-down version was hardly the kind of film that would fill cinema screens in the way that more crowd-pleasing horrors could across wider age ranges. Remakes also inspire cynicism because of the perception that they seek to improve on an original telling, or at least split the market. In terms of English-language remakes of foreign films, there is an added layer of concern in the perceived pandering to those unwilling to watch the original due to having to read subtitles, rather than finding the content particularly objectionable. Hollywood making their own version could, in theory, discourage seeking out the original because of the perceived extra effort in having to read subtitles. Your mileage may vary as to how true that is, as even the worst remake is still advertised as such, so draws at least a percentage of interested parties to the original version by default.

Initial responses to the remake were sceptical, likely not assisted by the idea that the production company behind Twilight were involved, eyeing Kristen Stewart as the lead. This article from the LA Times ‘French horror hit 'Martyrs' will undergo an American exorcism’ details how even early approaches were focused on how the remake would lose something from the original. The Last Exorcism Director, Daniel Stamm was originally attached to the project and seemed to set the whole endeavour up for failure in the eyes of many by stating his intent to, ‘give a glimmer of hope’. While Stamm did not continue with the project and departed citing budget constraints having a potentially damaging effect on his career progression, his words had confirmed the fears of fans of the original, so even when the Goetz Brothers took over, the remake already felt like a failed, misunderstood attempt. The low budget of the film is a further sticking point, given that it represents the desire to court the controversial nature of the original, without necessarily having enough faith to commit a great deal of money to it. In the book Fear, Cultural Anxiety and Transformation: Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films Remade (2009), it states that ‘the remaking of films often occurs for economic reasons’. The book further posits that there ‘is less of an economic risk involved when remaking a tried-and-true film than there is in springing something completely new on the viewing public’. In the case of Martyrs, it is easy to see how the remake starts to look like a cynical, cash-in attempt with relatively little thought paid to honouring the original. The film was seemingly made quietly and relatively suddenly, as reflected in this Bloody Disgusting article, with little buzz or build. In hindsight, this looks like the Producers had already lost faith in the film and any claims of it being the ‘ultimate horror movie’ were best kept quiet.

Critical Consensus

Fear, Cultural Anxiety and Transformation also makes the case that ‘twin texts, Original and Remake, are critically compared to one another, so that the qualities of each are seen only as reversals of the other’s failures’. This feels particularly key in discussing both versions of Martyrs from a critical perspective. With seven years between the original and remake, the original had time to build a reputation surrounding its intensity, bleakness and power. The film, along with other films in the New French Extremity had found success outside of France and their transgressive elements became either a selling point or a reason to avoid depending on who you asked.

While the original version of the film invited praise from many, it also had its detractors. Rotten Tomatoes has the film aggregated at 64% with an audience score of 69%. Critics like Rebecca Hawkes were keen to reframe the torture scenes as different from the likes of Saw and Hostel because the surrounding context made it clear that the torture was not there for ‘viewers to relish or enjoy its painful scenes’, which I would tend to agree with. Still, there were many, like Xan Brooks who gave the film a short and reasonably brutal review, reducing it to ‘Gallic torture porn in which a pair of hysterical young women slip and slide around in pools of blood wearing naught but their undies’. (No, I’m not sure what film he watched either.) Remakes are often considered to be the Hollywood system flexing their power against other nations, co-opting films and dominating release schedules, but in some reviews of Martyrs there is a sense that the film is only seen as brilliant or profound due to its French origins and separation from that system. Words like quasi-philosophical (Wendy Ide) and pretentiousness (Peter Whittle) were levelled at the film with Whittle going further, stating ‘All it really demonstrates is that there is something seriously rotten in the state of France’. The split between positivity and negativity seemed primarily based on what the film made you feel, with some finding moments of empathy amongst the brutality and others finding even these attempts too empty.

The remake has even fewer defenders, scoring an incredibly low 9% with critics and 15% with audiences according to Rotten Tomatoes. Termed ‘meatless’ (Henry Barnes) and ‘sanitised’ (Anton Bitel), the film was confirmed as having fallen short of the brutality and power of the original. The release strategy also did nothing to inspire confidence, heading straight to DVD, rather than the confidence of a cinema release. It seemed that the budget concerns, quiet making of and early stumbles had made the film one that no one wanted to take a chance on. It had failed on both gore and philosophical terms, disappointing both those looking for a lighter reprieve from the original and those looking for more of the same intensity. Before writing this article, I had only watched the remake once and dismissed it almost immediately and it is only as time has gone on that I’ve felt it worth revisiting. However, many films, much-maligned on release have come to find an appreciative audience and even operate as cultural touch points so revisiting the film, along with the original years later, feels like an opportunity to look at the film on a deeper level. The remainder of this article will focus on how they differ and what difference that makes. For the sake of brevity, the years of the films may be used in discussion – 2008 for the original and 2015 for the remake.

Plots

The 2008 version opens with the distressing vision of a young girl fleeing a warehouse, clearly distressed and injured. She is later taken into a home for recovery and although the warehouse is investigated, and instruments of torture are found, the culprits are never located. Focus shifts to the girl, young Lucie (Jessie Pham) finding friendship and support with young Anna (Erika Scott), another girl at the home. Lucie experiences distressing visions and Anna is questioned by adults at the home as to what Lucie remembers. After a time-jump, a family eating breakfast are interrupted by a knock at the door, which turns out to be a woman with a shotgun. She brutally murders all members of the family and we find out that it is Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) who believes the family were involved in her original ordeal. She is joined by Anna (Morjana Alaoui), who, although understandably distressed by Lucie’s actions, attempts to clean up the scene. When she discovers that the mother of the family has survived, she tries to save her life. Viewing this as a betrayal and still haunted by terrifying visions, Lucie kills the mother and then herself, leaving Anna alone. Anna spends time in the house, eventually uncovering an underground facility – our first confirmation that Lucie has targeted her captors. Anna meets a victim and despite trying to care for her, the woman becomes unhinged and is shot by someone else returning to the house. At this point, it is revealed that a cult is operating to attempt to find evidence of an afterlife, through the torture of young women. Anna endures horrific abuse, culminating in being flayed alive. The cult believes she has entered the state they seek and she whispers something inaudible to cult leader Mademoiselle (Catherine Bégin). While the cult eagerly awaits the results, Mademoiselle removes her makeup, tells her second-in-command to ‘keep doubting’ and shoots herself. The film ends on the definition of martyr as witness.

The 2015 offering initially covers much the same ground with young Lucie (Ever Prishkulnik) and Anna (Elyse Cole) forming a bond after Lucie is rescued. However, the scenes after Lucie kills the family change the course of the film. Instead of Lucie (Troian Bellisario) succumbing to her trauma, she lives and is captured by the cult again. Lucie is valuable to the cult because she cannot die and so represents better opportunities for their experimentation and Anna is shown some other instances of the group’s torture methods. Anna (Bailey Noble) finds other victims, including a young girl called Sam (Caitlin Carmichael) and seeks to free Lucie, enduring some torture herself. Eventually escaping, and sending Sam for outside help, Anna finds her way to the room where the cult is awaiting Lucie’s revelation after being flayed alive renders her into the right state and gets close to her. Lucie whispers what she has seen to Anna, but the words are overheard by a cult member who promptly shoots himself. Anna then shoots Eleanor (Kate Burton) before being wounded by another cult member. She lies next to Lucie and the pair die together while the film provides a vision of them together as children on a roundabout.

The differences across plots are so vast that it is perhaps no surprise that the remake did not work as well. Even though both girls die at the conclusion of 2015, there is a sense that they have still ‘won’ by some measure. Sam has alerted authorities; two important cult members are dead, and the facility will be uncovered. The two women die together, with Lucie sharing the all-important secret with Anna. Furthermore, the suggestion that Lucie is valuable because she can endure very high amounts of pain without dying lends her the edge of something supernatural, rather than human. The darker inference of 2008’s cult is that these are very ordinary women with no known tolerances or abilities that are still subjected to abuse. 2008 is far bleaker, with Lucie’s trauma being unsurmountable and leading Anna directly to be captured and tortured alone. Although what Anna tells Mademoiselle is destabilising there is still the sense that the cult will continue. The rest of this article will examine the different elements and how each of these lead to very different films.

Presentation

From Organic Tales, a documentary following the making of Martyrs, Pascal Laugier’s yearning for authenticity is clear. His stars are placed on strict diets and engage in lengthy choreography practices to be able to do their stunts as far as possible, coached by Gaëlle Cohen. Part of this is likely down to budget, in addition to Laugier being seen to constantly think like an Editor, trying his utmost to direct scenes that make for a smoother edit. There is a clear reliance on physicality within the film, including physical performers to provide the contorted movements required of Lucie’s visions. Of course, Laugier’s methods (he readily admits his negative energy when filming) and search for authenticity has presented very serious ethical concerns in the past few years, leaving an actress scarred for life by a poorly rigged prop during the filming of Incident in a Ghostland. While there is not much material about the making of the remake, there are no stories of danger or the sense the film was something everyone involved endured, rather than enjoyed. Of course, the relative lack of enthusiasm for the remake and the quick release to DVD means that there is less appetite for stories about the production which could account for the lack of publicity interviews or bonus material. The Martyrs remake appears to be the kind of experiment the studio wants to bury as deeply as the facility within the film.

It is also necessary to look at other films of the New French Extremity to see the context in which the original Martyrs emerges. In the book Directory of World Cinema: France, Ben McCann writes that films like Ils, L’Interieur and Frontière(s) ‘engage in a fascinating dialogue with recent political and social events in France, grafting metaphors of border porosity and domestic invasion onto their narratives of visual excess’. This accounts for Martyrs’ genre shifts and unpackaging of expected norms and conventions, all while focused on the idea of normality hiding something far more sinister. McCann writes that the films suggest ‘those paradigms of stability, civility, orthodoxy and superiority are in fact a fallacy, and that modern France is an increasingly paranoid realm subtended by the atavistic, the irrational, and above all, the primal’. The happy, functional family sitting above the facility that holds such horrors is a perfect reckoning with this concept. It is also easy to place Martyrs in the realm of ‘cinema of sensation’ from Martine Beugnet, who in Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression identified certain films that gave ‘precedence to the corporeal, material dimension of the medium’. The American films identified as ‘torture-porn’, whether you are agreeable to the term or not, are usually placed in a post-9/11 context where national mourning, identity seeking and increasing levels of violence playing out in the public sphere find an expression in increasingly violent set pieces. The remake of Martyrs falters because it attempts to replicate a film when it does not share that same context. While Laugier’s inspiration for the script appears to be a severe case of personal depression rather than open cultural comment, it is difficult not to see this as a social comment on unknown and unseen horrors contributing to the maintenance of the status quo. It is a theme that is more exploited in films like Us and Parasite but certainly acts as an undercurrent here. Martyrs 2015 is preoccupied with the central friendship and so everything else feels secondary.

Both versions of Lucie as a child are initially visited by a sinister, seemingly supernatural presence. In 2008, we see Lucie carefully block the door before she tries to sleep but is still disturbed by a vision of something above her bed. This moment represents the first stumble in 2015’s reimagining. Laugier’s Martyrs takes care to amplify the seemingly impossible elements of the figure while also retaining the sense of it being something human. Shadow is used to effectively obscure much of the face of the figure, retaining the full force of the image for Lucie to confront years later. This also speaks volumes in that Lucie is so young she is unable to make sense of the cruelty she has seen and so the inability to see the figure entirely as a person is a further element of repressed trauma. The 2015 take features a jump-scare where the digitally altered, wholly unsubtle demonic face is the first hint that the film will divert from its predecessor, placing it far more in the realms of outwardly supernatural. Importantly, the figure’s face appears to have nothing in common with the methods of torture employed later and so lacks that meaning. It is possible to view the face as Lucie’s trauma creating a literal monster out of her memories, but it just lacks any impact. Despite this, the moments before the scare are effective, with white bed sheets becoming a visual echo of the curtains from the unit where Lucie was tortured and serving as a prominent visual reminder of her trauma. In a film that too often forgets the impact of suffering, this moment leaves an impression. It is a shame then, that the CGI face afterwards undermines the seriousness. The intrusion of CGI takes away considerably from the feeling of ‘cinema of sensation’.

Lucie

The first difference is how much we see of Anna and Lucie together as children. In the 2015 film, we see young Anna attempting to befriend Lucie using a stolen cookie as a peace offering. There is a tweeness to their encounters that rather undercuts the degree of Lucie’s trauma and while in the 2008 version Lucie also has some moments of levity, they feel rather more short-lived. Lucie’s life before she was found by the cult is left open in both versions, with neither film delving into why she was not collected by parents after her rescue, or why she was seemingly not declared missing when she was taken. It is possible to read into this the idea that Lucie’s parents were early adopters of the cult direction and sacrificed their daughter to the cause although it is equally possible that Lucie had no interested parents at all. Both options add a further sense of sadness to Lucie’s life and certainly the original tends to take the view that the misery she has experienced cannot be overcome and she is essentially doomed from the start.

Both films deal with Anna’s betrayal of Lucie: an example of Anna’s need to always contribute care, rather than developing a sense of self-preservation. After Anna attempts to save the mother who has survived the first wave of Lucie’s attack it spurs a further frenzy from Lucie and the figure seemingly attacking her. As this evolves, it becomes clearer that the figure is a physical manifestation of Lucie’s trauma, survivor’s guilt and a constant, painful reminder of how she left behind others in the same situation during her escape. The major divergence in the two plots comes at this stage, 2008 Lucie is overcome by her demons, slitting her throat outside the house, dying in front of a grief-stricken Anna. The 2015 Lucie is thrown over the staircase and knocked unconscious, but lives, placed on the sofa to rest. The absence of Lucie leaves a chasm in Anna’s life and this is punctuated by the time she remains in the house. The fact that the focus of the cult remains primarily on Lucie gives the feeling of a smaller, insular operation, rather than something that spans the country – it makes the cult too focused and too broad all at once.

In the American remake, the cult reveals that Lucie can endure incredible amounts of pain without dying. While the original also finds a way for the cult to focus primarily on young women (more on that later) giving Lucie a special ability is a confusing addition. If the cult can identify women with these abilities, then why take the risk on anyone else? This sense of giving their heroines a special ability takes further away from exploring social and cultural pain, sanitising their endurance. While there is some added pathos to be found in the fact that despite her escape, her desire to enact revenge culminates in her being recaptured and the cult following through on their earlier plans, it lacks the punch of Lucie deciding on her own fate after her revenge fails to make the traumatic visions stop.

Much of the power of Martyrs is Anna’s ordeal and how it transforms her mentally and physically. Even when Lucie is taken back by the cult in 2015 there is no development. 2008’s moment where Anna hears Lucie’s voice telling her to ‘let go’ is a powerfully emotional turning point in which Anna ceases to be herself and begins to transcend. Lucie is denied this in 2015, despite still undergoing horrendous abuse it feels like we’re blocked from seeing her transcend in any way and we learn almost nothing new about her, despite her extended appearance in the film.

Anna

In both versions, Anna is questioned about Lucie, particularly what she remembers of her ordeal. Anna functions as a caregiver and quieter, more stable counterpoint to Lucie’s deeply held trauma and erratic behaviour. She is used as an authority on Lucie, quizzed by panels for input into Lucie’s recovery and presumably, investigating where the people responsible have gone. Notably, we know very little about why Anna is being raised at the home. The original film includes a scene after Lucie’s death where Anna attempts to connect with her mother over the telephone, but it is short-lived and still leaves a considerable gap in our knowledge of Anna’s upbringing.

Lucie’s brutal attack on the family living above the facility treads much the same ground, close enough to be shot-for-shot between the versions. Crucially, Anna’s involvement differs between the two – in the original, she is outside waiting for Lucie’s phone call, clearly aware that Lucie was seeking out the family, which does a great deal to make Anna complicit from the start. By contrast, 2015’s Anna is awoken by a phone call from Lucie alerting her to what has happened and while she rushes to her aid, that foreknowledge in the original speaks volumes about Anna’s total commitment to Lucie. Anna is perhaps the most altered character between the two versions, even though the remake entirely changes Lucie’s trajectory. Anna’s changes do more to destabilise the meaning of the original film than the major plot changes. The film uses ‘witness’ as a definition of a martyr, divorcing it from the traditional, mostly religious idea of martyrdom and into a more nihilistic take whereby the martyr is killed for a cause they do not have full knowledge of or any belief in. Anna is thrown into crisis by Lucie’s actions, even though there is a sense that this has been coming for some time. By contrast, the remake initially distancing Anna from Lucie’s action gives more of a sense that this is a more sudden decision. Across both versions, if Anna truly believes in anything, its Lucie, so the 2008 version where they lose one another feels far crueller than the alternative take on events in the remake.

From their early interactions, we see that Anna is dedicated to her caretaker role and losing Lucie means losing her purpose. Her role is not only a personal undertaking, but it has been validated by the adults in the home and Lucie herself. During Anna’s time at the house, she is seen to phone her mother – another fractured, difficult relationship in her life given she was in a home as a child, which speaks to her beginning to search for someone else to fill that void. When this fails, she is again left on her own, which leads her to the basement. Here, the grisly but highly emotional scene of Anna tending to another victim is further evidence of Anna transferring her need to care to the closest available person. She even says outright, “I can’t help you,” before starting to tend to her wounds. Anna is an emotional masochist, throwing herself repeatedly into doomed relationships. The dwelling on the wounds of the woman is a confrontational move in which the audience can see every mark on their skin, painting a picture of the cruel and unusual punishments being undertaken. The care is short-lived and again, we are given a vision of trauma too insurmountable to overcome, leading Anna directly to her demise.

The 2015 film struggles to give Anna the same motivation. Throughout the film, there is a defined sense that Anna only really cares about Lucie, with everything else becoming secondary and peripheral, even herself. Despite this greater dedication, it removes a moment from the original where Anna attempts to kiss Lucie during the clean-up. The moment is not missed as it feels somewhat out of place in the original and feels more like another example of Anna further chasing hopeless opportunities, but when they feel more dedicated to one another, that extension of intimacy would be more fitting. There is a sense that Anna’s protective instinct, up until that point at least, also applies to herself, suggesting a strong sense of self-preservation and ability to adapt. Anna’s transformation in 2008 is as powerful as it is brutal, and all credit is due to Alaoui’s performance. This is not to denigrate the performances in the remake, but the material just isn’t as rich and doesn’t allow for the sense of transformation or becoming that the original provides.

Other Victims

While it may seem strange to include the family that Lucie attacks with other victims, in both versions, we only know a small amount about them and they exist to push the narrative, rather than as fully formed characters. The 2015 family are presented as affable, indulging in light, gentle banter with one another and the fake-out chase and fight from the original is removed, placing them all at the table at the outset. The original film presents another opportunity to misdirect the audience here, with a close-up on the daughter Marie Belfond’s swimming success. Given the outset of the film sets up torture focused on a young girl, the emphasis on Marie’s happy life feels set to be turned upside down. In contrast to some of the narratives other, more abrupt and blatant genre shifts, this is a small, but still deliberately wrong-footing move. Of course, the hidden horror of the happy photographs and the wealth of the family is seemingly funded by their parents’ work with the cult. Indeed, Mademoiselle references their greater organisation and by extension, their continued donations to the cause to create a better, more secure and high-tech facility than the warehouse that Lucie escaped from. The Belfond children can make mistakes, take different directions and they are supported, with or without their knowledge, by incredibly dark means.

Anna finds Sam, a young girl, who she decides to incorporate into her rescue mission and certainly turns her attention momentarily from Lucie. Despite this, later in the film when she finds another adult female victim, she leaves her, claiming that she must find her friend. This is even after the woman assists Anna in dispatching a guard so she can continue her search for Lucie. In the original, Lucie’s survivor’s guilt is triggered by a woman she cannot stop to help so it feels all the bleaker for adult Anna, armed with a gun no less, to make no effort to free the other woman. Her focus on Lucie and Sam, but the ability to ignore the suffering of others makes her selfish, which is arguably a more nihilistic take than anything in the original film. While the original disposes of the other victims in a grisly manner, there is still a sense that their experience and presence leave a mark on the film, something that is lost by championing only one or two, selecting, as the cult does, the ‘right kind of victim’.

The Cult/Methods/Religion

At the outset of 2015, the two girls are living at a home run by nuns and the film is at pains to show them engaged in prayer, including flashbacks later in the film. While the original version features a fleeting glimpse of a nun in footage of Lucie as a child, indicating that there is some religious presence in their lives, there is no emphasis on if or how this has influenced either Anna or Lucie’s world view. Openly having Anna and Lucie pray shifts the perspective, even if that shift is very slight as it gives them a sense of belief, or at least an attempt at belief, in something beyond the life they live, something notably absent in the lives of 2008’s Anna and Lucie as the film seeks to remove almost all notion of religion from the cult activities. Mademoiselle’s explanation of one of the photographs of a martyr in the latter part of the 2008 film takes care to state that the woman involved is an atheist. The remake retains the circumstances of her near-death but leaves out her lack of religion. The absence of religion is far more powerful within 2008’s telling and opens the notoriously open-ended nature of the ending further.

It is in the very conclusion of the film that the films further depart. In the original, Anna’s captors raise the alarm that she is in the state they have been searching for and everyone needs to gather quickly. The details of Anna’s trauma are difficult to stomach; she has been in a catatonic, otherworldly state for hours, still alive beyond all recognition. Mademoiselle is seen to lean over her to hear the secrets of the afterlife. After the inaudible whisper, she leaves, appearing in a later scene to remove her makeup and after telling her second in command to “keep doubting”, promptly shoots herself. The film leaves what this means open to interpretation, along with how this impacts the cult; do they regroup under a new leader and continue the experiments, or do they disband, failing to ever capture what they were looking for? In contrast, the remake has Anna, in almost action-movie fashion, get to the room where Lucie is held on a cross. A few cult members are killed, and Anna settles next to Lucie, who inaudible whispers what she sees to Anna. Fading to an increasingly laboured visual of the two girls playing on a roundabout together at the home, the facility goes up in flames, but the audience are aware that Sam has been released and is seeking help. The finale appears to suggest that the cult has come to an end, or else has a lot more to replace than a figurehead. It isn’t the expected happy, sugar-coated ending perhaps expected of American productions, but it still affords a degree of reunion and comfort to the pair.

There are a few ways where the remake attempts to top the brutality of its predecessor but in several ways it misunderstands what makes the concept of Martyrs so horrifying. Sam, for example, adds a level of discomfort as we are confronted with the fact that the cult is still involving children in their experiments. However, Sam’s young age means there is (rightly) no focus on the punishment she has received as part of this, so an element of that impact is lost. The original cult feels like something that has been carefully evolved – Mademoiselle even outlines that they have tried different victims and found young women to be most effective. She also mentions that the torture is required to be done ‘methodically, systematically and coldly’. The repeated scenes of Anna being abused in the original are incredibly impactful, given that much of the time, it features a large, strong man physically beating Anna into submission. Her head is roughly shaved (another example of a scene drawing authenticity by Alaoui having her hair cut in the scene) and there is a genuine sense of unending discomfort, fear and suffering. The repeated audio and visual cues of the ladder sliding back down, signalling another attack function almost as conditioning. I certainly felt a powerful emotional response during my first (and later) viewings of this scene. It feels relentless. The remake, on the other hand, deals in the kind of torture that seems borrowed from the BDSM scene, rather than anything that could feasibly break a person’s spirit. While the use of a horse’s bit and electrocution seems to be a more sophisticated method, it just does not have the same impact as the outright cruelty of the original because it distances the torturers from the subject. 

The remake also attempts to showcase more of what the cult actually does to their victims, but the vast difference in methods presents only more confusion. One woman is burnt at the stake (perhaps a further nod to the cult’s more religious influence), while others are electrocuted, leading to the sense of a cult in progress, still trying out methods to get the best results. It also functions as a reasonably cheap way of the film shoehorning in more torture methods as moments to shock and enforce the horror rather than trusting in less elaborate methods with a focus on smaller details that produce a sense of horror.

Keep Doubting

In trying to replicate a film that sits in a particular context, Martyrs 2015 fails to reconfigure those themes for its own context. Forcing its American protagonists and features (like the move to action rescue movie in some places) into a context driven by sensation, rather than action means it loses so much impact. Sanitised and muddled because the material is too dark to explore, the Martyrs remake isn’t bad because it is American, but because it fails to add anything distinctly American for it to say something about that context. There’s no search for identity or crisis of seeing so much violence play out that seats it with other films like it in an American context, but it also lacks that sense of seeking the darkness beyond respectable exteriors and trying to make meaning of it, because it can only lean back on the central female friendship. Even in that, it can’t quite make their connection intimate enough to warrant their closeness and why they are seemingly willing to endure these transgressions.

To conclude, there is little to recommend the remake, certainly over the original, nor does it conjure anything particularly insightful about the wider state of American horror filmmaking at the time of its release, nor the handling of other remakes of so-called extreme films. In some cases, it is possible to see the remake as an example of how difficult it is to replicate truly horrifying material and how audience backlash or complete lack of interest makes these kinds of remakes not worth even the smallest studio budgets. Elements like the face of Lucie’s tormentor feel closer to Insidious than any study of human cruelty and the abruptness of switches in genre feel more laboured and deliberately paced so they can’t fulfil that sense of the rug being pulled from beneath its audience. I’ll concede that it is likely more a case of knowing the plot beats in advance from the original, but the film makes little attempt to switch up its surprises to any solid effect.

Even in the setting of the 2015 horror scene, Martyrs feels like an outlier, neither having the ghost-house style jump-factor of the Insidious or Sinister films, nor the ingenuity and menace of Green Room or The Witch, for example. Instead, the film sits as much of an experiment as the cult at the centre of it, providing neither profundity, nor total shallowness, leaving it in a strange state where it fails to fill the needs of anyone watching. The original sits alongside similarly troubling, nihilistic films in the form of Eden Lake and The Strangers, feeding into an appetite for darker material, proving the concept that misery loves company. The fact that the film has largely been forgotten, other than to be derided and compared to the superior is unfortunate, but understandable.

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