Martyrs

Pascal Laugier's Martyrs arrived in 2008 as the most uncompromising entry in a brief, brutal movement French critics labelled the New French Extremity — a loose grouping of mid-2000s genre films, alongside Alexandre Aja's Switchblade Romance, Xavier Gens's Frontier(s), and Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's Inside, that pushed national horror past the polite envelope of its Anglo-American contemporaries. Laugier, whose debut Saint Ange had been a more classical gothic exercise, financed Martyrs as a France–Canada co-production and used the second film to articulate something stranger and more personal — a genre object that critics could not comfortably file under slasher, revenge thriller, or torture cinema.

The opening movement follows Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï), a young woman who escaped a derelict slaughterhouse as a child after being held and abused by people she could not identify. Years on, she is convinced she has tracked the family responsible to a comfortable suburban home. Anna (Morjana Alaoui), her friend from the children's shelter where she was placed after her escape, accompanies her on a confrontation that opens the film's central question. Cinematographers Stéphane Martin and Nathalie Moliavko-Visotzky shoot in restrained, near-clinical compositions; the music is sparse; the performances from Jampanoï and Alaoui carry the film's emotional architecture.

Reception was profoundly polarised. The film was banned outright in some markets and restricted in others, while French critics and the international horror press — Bloody Disgusting, Rue Morgue, Fangoria — placed it on best-of-decade lists and have continued to defend it as a landmark of twenty-first-century horror. A 2015 American remake was widely dismissed. Laugier's original remains the version that travels, taught in genre programmes and cited by directors from Aster to Ducournau as a film that redrew the limits of what European horror could attempt.