Martyrs is a hard film to talk about. I want to just lay it all out on the line and tell you everything that happened so I can justify my review of it. But the movie hasn’t come out yet so it’s unfair to taint people by telling them the surprises so they themselves can’t discover them and decide if they like them or not. So I’ll try my best to not go into deep spoilers but some of the beginning may lose some of it’s effect.
We open on a young girl running into the street. It’s obvious that she has been abused. We cut to a girls home and learn that she had been found but no one really knows who she is and she will not tell anyone what has happened to her. She is paired up with a girl named Anna hoping that she might form a friendship with her and will confide in her what happened. At night the girl (whom we find out is named Lucie) puts a chair by the door to keep anyone from coming in. Well she is startled in the night and it is shown that the door is wide open. Next week see a strange figure sitting on the end of her bed. Cut to 15 years later and we see a perfectly happy family interacting at the breakfast table. The doorbell rings and when the father answers it a grown up Lucie is thrust into their lives. Lucie believes she has a connection to the family. She calls Anna and when Anna goes to meet up with her the story really starts moving. It’s from here that I can’t spoil much as it will really take away from a person watching.
Some events unfold and Anna finds out some weird secrets about this normal family that throws this movie off into a completely weird direction.
I wish I could say I liked this movie. I just didn’t. I’ve heard some other reviews of this movie with people praising the hell out of it. But I just couldn’t get into it. The movie seems to try to be to many things. I found some of the stuff in the movie completely creepy and unnerving. But when we get into the motivation of the film I found it very flat and unsatisfying. There is a point where the direction of the movie makes a complete turn and almost makes it a completely different film. If you showed someone the first fifteen minutes of the film and then showed them the last fifteen minutes they would think it was a different movie altogether. I just didn’t enjoy the last half at all but again have heard so many positive reviews of the film that I have almost questioned my own thoughts on it. I guess check it out for yourself and decide if you like it or not. For me though I didn’t like the motivation of the film and felt that parts of the movie were strictly put in to be brutal and abusive.
2.5 out of 10