Martyrs

Martyrs never sits still. The film plays with a variety of standard horror tropes, from home invasion and spectral doppelgangers to total identity extinction. Scenarios are played out to completion then twisted and recontextualised, jumping off from an idea implicit to the previous sequence. This new stage is then spun to exhaustive conclusion, before the process begins again. Each beat is satisfying in seclusion, but taken as a whole Martyrs becomes faintly mind-boggling. Writer/director Pascal Laugier swerves neat nihilistic zings to press deeper into a mounting, pervasive state of horror that eventually becomes the totality of the experience. This is not to say that Martyrs is simply a series of expert riffs on horror aesthetics, the film routinely plays around with a variety of modern nightmare scenarios, ideas like a determined individual intruding into your 'safe' world, or being unfairly cast into an incarceration system that treats despair as industry. Horror in Martyrs is never a gag or punchline, it's another tool in a thesis that grapples with absolute, systematic misery. Martyrs is a thorough, almost overwhelming trip around the darkest, bleakest states of the human animal.