Martyrs · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A family sits down to breakfast. The light is ordinary: flat suburban daylight, nothing composed, no shadow worth mentioning. The doorbell rings. A young woman is standing there with a shotgun, and in under a minute everyone at that table is dead. Laugier shoots it without a flourish. No slow motion, no music swell, no angle that turns killing into cinema. That refusal of style is the film's first argument, and it spends the next ninety minutes making the rest of it at your expense.

Deleuze has a name for the relation between that kitchen and what turns out to be underneath it. In Cinema 1 he describes films where a recognizable social setting, the derived milieu of jobs and houses and breakfast, is only a crust over an originary world: a raw place of drives that the ordinary world exists to keep quiet. Stroheim's chateaux, Buñuel's deserts. Martyrs takes the figure literally and builds it in concrete. The house has a basement. The basement has an institution. The palette drains as you descend, from domestic daylight to institutional grey to windowless cells under clinical light, and it never comes back up. Deleuze would call that a line of slope, a world tilted one way only, toward exhaustion and death.

But his originary world runs on appetite, and this one doesn't. Mademoiselle's composure is the horror. Suffering here is administered rather than savored: on a schedule, by staff, toward a stated goal, so methodically that it looks like work for the people doing it. That's a real modification of the concept and worth naming. What Laugier puts under the suburban house isn't a beast. It's a program with a filing system.

The structure runs on the same refusal. Martyrs is three films, and the joins are engineered as ruptures rather than transitions: a revenge thriller abandoned mid-stride, a haunting overturned by the arrival of the society, then a long final act that cancels the terms of both. Deleuze calls a cut that connects across a gap rather than by continuity an irrational cut, an interstice, a join you have to think instead of follow. Psycho taught the genre it could murder its protagonist halfway and re-found itself on the wreckage. Laugier does it at the scale of whole acts, twice, so each rupture retroactively recodes what you've already watched.

Act two is where the recoding bites. The thing that attacks Lucie isn't a flashback. Deleuze reserves the recollection-image for the dated memory that files the past safely into a former present; what Lucie has is an onirosign, a dream-image, a circuit with no location in time she can point to. And it draws blood. The film keeps the trauma visually literal, a contorted abused body arriving from nowhere, and by the time you learn the wounds are self-inflicted the categories have collapsed. You can't say which side of the image the injuries came from.

Then Laugier does the thing the film is actually for. In most cinema a character perceives a situation and acts, and the action closes it. Deleuze calls this the movement-image, and it's the engine of nearly every genre film ever made, revenge very much included. The first act runs it at full power. Then the film takes it away, first from the plot, then, with clinical patience, from the body. Anna is confined, restrained, finally immobilized. Nothing she perceives can be answered by any movement she's still capable of. Deleuze's term for that condition is a pure optical situation, and for the person inside it, the voyant: the seer, who can only look and endure. He found it in postwar Italy, in a maid watching a kitchen, a boy walking through rubble, and read it as an epoch losing its belief that acting could change anything. Laugier's version is obscene because it's manufactured. The society produces a seer, surgically, on purpose. A historical condition becomes a protocol with a success rate.

And the camera cools to meet it. The jagged handheld coverage of the opening gives way to near-immobile observational framing; the cutting slows until shots run long enough to become unbearable. The film withdraws its own visual excitement exactly as the pain peaks. That's the cruelest formal decision in it, because fast cutting is how horror normally lets you off. What's left is a face. Deleuze built his entire account of the close-up on The Passion of Joan of Arc, where the face is cut loose from body, action and space to hold a single quality: his qualisign, a still face reflecting a pure feeling instead of doing anything with it. Alaoui inherits that wholesale — sustained, near-scoreless close-ups on a martyr, transcendence registered through near-total passivity, something going out behind the eyes. Cries and Whispers supplies the other half, durational stillness on women in agony inside a drained interior. Martyrs isn't quoting these films. It's running their machinery at a temperature they never went to.

Here's the strange part, and the reason the film outlasts its notoriety. The society's doctrine is a theory of images. They believe shock, sustained and escalated past all endurance, will force a passage to a vision otherwise unavailable. Deleuze, following Eisenstein, calls the spectator compelled into thought by the image a spiritual automaton. It's cinema's oldest ambition: that a strong enough image doesn't request thought, it produces it. Eisenstein thought the cut could do this. Mademoiselle thinks flesh can. She is running montage theory on a human being, which is why Salò is the exact ancestor — torture staged as systematized institutional procedure, catharsis flatly refused, the act of watching implicated in the act itself.

Deleuze's counter-figure arrives right on time. Against Eisenstein he sets Artaud, for whom cinema's real subject is impower, thought running up against what it cannot think. The martyr does speak, finally. She whispers her testimony to Mademoiselle, and it's the only thing in this film we're not given. Deleuze would call that a speech act rather than dialogue: testimony, a report from somewhere, an utterance that founds rather than converses. Everything else the camera holds without blinking, flaying included. The single withheld image is a sound. Then Mademoiselle's cryptic reply, and it stops, and you're standing exactly where the society stands: desperate to know what the suffering bought, and refused. That's the unthought, and it's a trap with your name on it.

What did it do? It broke horror's oldest contract, the one promising that pain gets paid back, in vengeance or survival or meaning. Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre gave Laugier the grimy, deliberately unstylized grammar of captivity and payback, and act one is a fully competent version of that film, thrown away on purpose. Quandt's "New French Extremity" named the cycle; Martyrs outlived the label because it asked out loud what the violence was supposed to be for, and then refused to say. The forward debts are legible. Hereditary takes the mid-film shock death that violently restructures a narrative and carries it into the elevated-horror decade. The Witch takes the proof that austere restraint and a transcendence-through-damnation ending can make extremity mean something. Raw extends the tactile practical-flesh craft into the next French generation. And the 2015 American remake is the control experiment: it keeps the escalation, softens the metaphysics, and what drains out of it measures precisely how much of the original was carried by formal decisions rather than plot.

Watch it again for the light. Sunday morning, then fluorescent, then almost nothing. The descent is finished before anyone says the word martyr. Then ask the question the film opens instead of closing: whether your own need to know what she saw differs from Mademoiselle's in kind, or only in degree.