Martyrs Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Martyrs Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Svet Atanasov January 8, 2011

Winner of the Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film in Gold at Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival, French director Pascal Laugier's "Martyrs" (2008) arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Canadian distributors Entertainment One Films. Unfortunately, there are no supplemental features included with this release. In French, with optional English, English SDH, and French SDH subtitles for the main feature. Region-Free. Please be advised that the film contains disturbing footage that is not appropriate for minors!

Out

Note: The text below was first used for our review of Optimum Home Entertainment's Region-B release of Martyrs in 2009.

A severely traumatized girl, Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï), who has been missing for well over a year, is discovered by the French police. She is in stable condition, but unwilling to talk about her captors. The few bits of information the police are able to extract from her reveal that she has been tortured at an unknown location. A lucky break then helps the police identify the location where Lucie was held captive -- in an abandoned industrial building with a sophisticated torture chamber -- but, for some unspecified reason, the case is dropped.

Fifteen years later. Lucie rings the doorbell of a lavish suburban house. A man appears, and Lucie immediately blows him apart with her rifle. Then, she proceeds to kill the man’s wife, teenage daughter, and teenage son. Not too long after that, Lucie’s best friend, Anna (Morjana Alaoui), appears, too. She attempts to clean up the mess, but something very unusual happens.

Pascal Laugier gathered plenty of attention with Martyrs. Because Martyrs was initially scarred with the French equivalent of our NC-17, and then, after much publicized support from several top French critics and film directors, promptly rerated, it earned significantly more publicity than its creators had hoped for. The controversy also helped Martyrs in foreign markets, where many people went to see it precisely because of it.

But this controversy was not unjustified. (For what it's worth, it was also not part of a smart publicity campaign). Martyrs is, as some of the people who defended its initial rating have claimed, a genuinely disturbing genre film. It is an intelligent genre film, too, which is a quality that makes it even more disturbing. So, if the original rating was an honest attempt to make this clear to potential viewers, and it appears to have been, then it is very easy to argue that it was entirely justified.

Three key shifts reset the narrative and transform Martyrs into a unique genre film. The first shift occurs early, after Lucie kills each member of the suburban family, and crucial clues about what is to come next begin emerging. If these clues are correctly identified, predicting where Martyrs would go is not all that difficult.

The second shift occurs after the torture chamber is revealed. This is where Martyrs abruptly evolves into a skin-crawling endurance test that justifies its initial harsh rating. The material from the endurance test is carefully conceived and very effectively shot to leave deep mental scars.

The third and final shift occurs approximately twenty minutes before the finale. Here, Martyrs engages the mind in a way a 'serious' film would, and, after a few more curveballs, moves into a territory that conventional genre films, and especially horror films, avoid. It is what makes it a borderline controversial film.

Many years ago, I attended a theatrical screening of Peter Hyams’ Outland, a futuristic action thriller about an ambitious police marshal who confronts a group of drug smugglers on Io, Jupiter’s innermost moon. Halfway through Outland, one of the drug smugglers is detained. He is given a special suit with a hose attached to an oxygen tank and thrown into a vacuum chamber that functions as a prison cell. Later, someone unplugs the hose, and the man in the suit explodes. Hayms’ camera gets close enough to show what is left of him, a mish-mash of scattered soft pieces of human flesh, and then zooms away. This sequence caught me off guard and, without my approval, my mind instantly stored it somewhere. Then, for years, my mind refused to discard it.

Martyrs, in its entirety, is now stored somewhere in my mind, too. It caught me unprepared, just as that graphic sequence from Outland did a long time ago, and it genuinely terrified me. It really did. However, while viewing Martyrs is a very intense experience, it did not terrify me because of what Laugier's camera shows. It is how it justifies it that did the trick. It makes the disturbing look utterly real.

Martyrs Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, encoded with VC-1 and granted a 1080p transfer, Pascal Laugier's Martyrs arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Canadian distributors Entertainment One Films.

This is a solid high-definition transfer, and from what I could tell, practically identical to the ones used by Optimum Home Entertainment in the UK and Wild Side in France for their corresponding Blu-ray releases of Martyrs. Generally speaking, fine object detail is very good, and contrast levels are pleasing. Once again, there are minor clarity fluctuations, most of which occur during the underground scenes, but they are inherited (and also present on the UK and French releases). Color reproduction is convincing - the variety of cold browns, grays, greens, reds, and especially the blacks all look terrific. Finally, there are no serious stability issues to report in this review. (Note: This is a Region-Free Blu-ray disc. Therefore, you will be able to play it on your player regardless of your geographical location).

Martyrs Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There is only one audio track on this Blu-ray disc: French DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. For the record, Entertainment One Films have provided optional English, English SDH, and French SDH subtitles for the main feature. Please note that the English, English SDH, and French SDH subtitles are in very light (almost white) yellow.

The French DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is very good. The bass is potent and punchy, the rear channels not overly active but very effective (there are two, perhaps three scenes during the second half of the film that are incredibly impressive), and the high-frequencies are not overdone. The dialog is crisp, clean, stable, and very easy to follow. There are no balance issues with Alex Cortés and Willie Cortés' atmospheric soundtrack either. Finally, I did not detect any pops, cracks, hissings, or audio dropouts to report in this review.

Martyrs Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Most unfortunately, there are absolutely no supplemental features to be found on this Blu-ray disc whatsoever.

Martyrs Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

My only complaint about this Canadian Blu-ray release of Pascal Laugier's Martyrs is that it does not contain any supplemental features. The technical presentation, however, is solid. The price is also right. Additionally, unlike Optimum Home Entertainment's Blu-ray release, which was the only English-friendly Blu-ray release on the market until now, the Canadian Blu-ray release is Region-Free. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.