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Monday, July 6, 2009

BD impressions: Martyrs

12:25 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

Watched Martyrs last night, and it was... well, an experience, and one that I've yet to develop a definite position on. I certainly didn't hate it, but I came away from it feeling decidedly unfulfilled, which may or may not have been director Pascal Laugier's deliberate intention. It's cold, brutal and nihilistic, and also incredibly distancing: despite the extreme acts of violence and torture (both psychological and physical) in which it revels, I never felt as if I was in the thick of it. I was constantly a voyeur, watching the abuse from a distance but never really connection with either abused or abuser. I find this very strange because it's a horrible film to watch. There's nothing fun about the violence we see in it, and it is for the most part unrelentingly realistic.

By the way, I definitely feel that we need a proper name with which to group the current breed of horror movies that have been labelled "torture porn" by the gutter press. While I personally hate that term, I don't think it can be denied that it refers to a very real group of films: the Hostels, Saws, The Passion of the Christs and now the Martyrs of the world, which immerse themselves fully in the depths of brutality and human suffering, focusing on unprovoked, unmitigated violence against those who can't or won't fight back. Despite what Laugier may have claimed, Martyrs is very much a part of this tradition.

Do my issues with this film stem from its refusal to provide the conventional sense of closure that we're accustomed to finding at the end of mainstream horror movies? Or is it simply that the film doesn't have as much to say about the human condition as it thinks it does? It's definitely more interesting than Laugier's first film, the rather generic Saint Ange/House of Voices, but also more frustrating. Am I guilty of wanting my films to be neatly packaged and easily digestible? I hope not, but Martyrs ultimately left me feeling that I hadn't had a full meal.

Shot on 16mm film and then blown up to 35mm for theatrical projection, Martyrs doesn't exactly look a million dollars - nor should you expect it to. Grain is pronounced, and the emphasis on choppy, hand-held photography means that detail tends to suffer more in static frames than when in motion. As a result, don't assume that the captures below (which I've tried to make as spoiler-free as possible, by the way) are completely reflective of how the disc looks in motion. Alas, this is yet another film to suffer from elevated blacks, which means that things tend to look rather murky. There is also some rather nasty-looking banding during the numerous fades to black during the second half of the film, which I suspect may be directly related to the incorrectly set black level. Finally, I suspect that the image has been somewhat horizontally filtered at some stage, given the noticeable horizontal ringing around the on-screen text during the opening credits (see Example 3). It's a pretty strong disc on the whole in spite of these flaws, and the overall look is appropriate to the film's tone and subject matter, but don't expect "demo material". 8/10

Martyrs
studio: Optimum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: VC-1;
file size: 16.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 23.91 Mbit/sec

2 Comments

 
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