Martyrs(2008) Vs. Martyrs(2016)

Director(2008): Pascal Laugier
Director(2016): The Goetz Brothers

Released: 2008 and 20016

Unrated For Both

Run Time: (2008)96 Minutes, (2016)86 Minutes

Genre: Horror

Cast(2008):
Morjana Alaoui: Anna
Mylene Jampanoi: Lucie
Catherine Begin: Mademoisselle

Cast(2016):
Troian Bellisario: Lucie
Bailey Noble: Anna
Kate Burton: Eleanor

I love horror movies.  I’ve loved them since I was a kid.  I grew up watching movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday The 13th and Hellraiser, as a lot of people from my generation did.  About 13 years ago, I was introduced to a new brand of horror movie:  The French Horror Movie.  High Tension, directed by Alexandre Aja, was a well-made and brutal slasher movie.  I was shocked at how violent it was.  Let me tell you about the French:  They don’t fuck around when it comes to horror.  Oh, no, they mean business.  High Tension blew me away.  It was a very recognizable kind of film, but it was done in such a way that gave the genre new life, so to speak.  So, I kept an eye out for more French horror flicks.  Inside and Frontier(s) came next and were exceptionally brutal.  They were absolutely fantastic, though.  In 2008, director Pascal Laugier unleashed one of the most controversial, brutal and unrelenting horror movies ever made: Martyrs.  It was very unsettling, and I had not seen anything like it before.  I had blind-bought it when it was released, and watched it.  The movie left such an impression on me, that I hadn’t seen it since then, until now.  So, why did I watch it again?  One reason: The movie was re-made for American audiences.  I know people didn’t like the original film because it was unflinching in its brutality and it didn’t pull any punches, but when I first heard about the re-make, I wondered why it was being re-made.  I’ll give my opinion on that later.

Both films have the same setup, with a young girl named Lucie, escaping from a warehouse.  She ends up with the police and is eventually handed over to an orphanage, where she befriends Anna.  10 years later, Lucie discovers that her captors had a family and she finds them.  After the father opens the front, he’s immediately blasted by Lucie wielding a double-barreled shotgun.  After sending him flying, Lucie hunts down and basically executes the rest of the family.  Afterwards, Lucie calls Anna over to the house to help her clean things, and Lucie begins to hallucinate.  She sees monsters that aren’t there.  This is where the two movies go in different directions.  In the original Martyrs, Lucie ends up slitting her own throat, because she couldn’t deal with the monsters that she was seeing.  In the new movie, she throws herself off the banister, but survives.  The story is interesting, but both movies come to some very different conclusions.  I won’t spoil the endings, but despite the same story, the movies are pretty different.

One of the things that I first noticed about the new film was the home invasion sequence.  It was far less bloody than the 2008 film.  The 2008 Martyrs was absolutely notorious for its violence.  Especially when it comes to the torture sequences.  See, in the original, Anna is captured and beaten to a pulp for minutes at a time.  It’s brutal.  In the new movie, it’s Lucie that gets the treatment, but we don’t see it.  We only hear it.  I can see how that can be unsettling for people who haven’t seen the 2008 movie.  I can certainly understand why the Goetz Brothers chose not to replicate Laugier’s film in it’s entirety, but they seem to counting on the people who have seen the original to see this new one.  The original Martyrs was a very bleak film, and when Anna was captured, we had absolutely no hope for her survival.  With the new one, there seemed to be a possibility that ONE of them could possibly survive.  The villains are also different.  The villains from Mr. Laugier’s film came across as a cult, led by an old woman who was at the end of her life.  For the 2016 version of Martyrs, these guys seem like organized crime.

The acting in both movies is surprisingly pretty good, even though the 2008 film takes the trophy.  The two ladies in the new movie do a really good job.  I don’t particularly like Kate Burton as the leader of the cult, because she comes across as slightly unhinged, whereas the Mademoiselle from 2008 has her shit together, and is as logical as you can be for a cult leader.  The new movie does borrow a lot of elements from the original such as the leader’s speech on martyrs and how rare they are.  They almost ripped that word for word from the French film.  The effects are fantastic in the original film, and mostly okay in the new one.  We do see some pretty bad CGI in the new Martyrs, but it’s a result of a low budget, so that can be forgiven.

A lot of critics who have seen both films tend to agree that the new Martyrs is watered-down.  I have to agree.  It doesn’t match the absolute brutal nature of the original film.  It’s a lot less violent and almost has a completely different kind of tone towards the end of the third act.  Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing the villains get theirs, so the new movie is cathartic in that regard, but it is still very disappointing that they pulled their punches.  The 2008 film sucker-punched with an experience that you won’t soon forget.  I don’t consider the new Martyrs to be a bad film.  I don’t think it is.  If you haven’t seen the original film, you might actually enjoy this film a bit more.  I think that’s the key word: Enjoy.  I didn’t enjoy the original, but I appreciated it and I loved it because it was unflinching.   I think the Goetz Brothers missed the mark a bit when they tried to go for a more optimistic route.  Ultimately, however, the 2016 film is a pale shadow of Patrick Laugier’s far superior film.  This is part of what’s wrong with re-makes today:  Film-makers forget what made the original film so memorable in the first place.  Ultimately, I can’t really recommend either for regular audiences.  The original can be extremely violent, and the new one is not violent enough.

Both movies are worth watching.  But I started rolling my eyes when I saw the direction the new movie was headed in.  It was that predictable.  At the end of the day, which film is better?  Patrick Laugier’s film from 2008, hands down.  It’s a brutal and ultimately a thought-provoking film that stays with you long after the credits roll.  My final scores:  Martyrs(2008): 9/10.  Martyrs(2016): 7.5/10.  Not a terrible movie, but not terribly memorable, either.