Women and Queerness in Horror: Martyrs (2008)

Warning: This article contains discussion of racism, war, child abuse, abduction, torture, murder, mental illness, self-harm, suicide, gore, and spoilers for Martyrs.

Boy, oh, boy am I glad you all are around to help me unpack this week’s pick so I can stop weighing my partner down with my endless parade of thoughts. Incidentally it’ll probably be the last for a while due to some life changes on the way though. As much as I’ll miss this series, I’m glad I’m wrapping up for now on something so thought-provoking.

I want to stress before we go anywhere else though, that Martyrs is a deeply and intensely violent film on multiple overlapping levels.

As such, this is a film that’s been described as misogynistic, controversial, graphic, gratuitous, and every now and then torture porn. I have my feelings about each of those descriptors. There are some that I agree with, and others I’d probably debate at length if you let me. I’m more interested in talking about the things it is than the things it isn’t, though; not least because nearly all of those qualifiers are subjective on their own.

If there are any two things I am confident of when it comes to dealing with Martyrs, it’s that it’s both deeply queer and deeply Catholic in its sensibility. The Catholic elements of the film, and its interweaving with national guilt and exploitation, have been unpacked at some length. As such, I don’t want to dwell too long on those.

In short, the cult at its center can’t be described as Catholic or even Christian. Nonetheless, it’s clear in Martyrs’ imagery and its philosophy that the film is bumping up against messianic imagery. This comes up in things like the shrouding of Lucie’s body and Anna’s quasi-crucifixion near the film’s end. It wrestles with theological understandings of the Atonement, most especially satisfaction theory and penal substitutionary atonement theory; and the ecstasy of saints.

So too does it grapple with France’s involvement in the Vietnam War and World War II, and a collective guilt that offers no easy exit. These elements aren’t explicitly stated, and some of them probably were helped along by my familiarity with the theological and political ideas with which Laugier was clearly wrestling. Still, they provide an important grounding for the rest of the film’s context — and an interesting interaction with the queerness embedded in the text.

The first time a queer element showed up (in my view) sits somewhere between implicit and a reach, but nonetheless feels worth talking about while we’re here. At minimum, it’s the kicked-down door through which the more straightforward queer elements of the film show up. Particularly with Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) breaking into the house that provides nearly all of Martyrs’ sets.

Lucie breaking into the house — and promptly dispatching the family that lives within it — is also deeply violent, though in many ways it pales against the rest of the film. The Belfonds are initially introduced as a familiarly tropey, nuclear, white heterosexual family. There’s a mom and dad, two kids, sibling squabbles, parents getting a little fed up with their willful elder son, etc.

It isn’t long before they’re thrown into dealing with the intrusion of an “outsider.” The presence of said outsider already begins to expose some of the fault lines in a family that, in another film, would be a “perfect ideal.” This is a familiar storyline from many a slasher and home invasion film — I’d be here all day if I talked about the implicit queerness of slasher villains — as it’s the entrance of the “other” that starts to expose the rot lying underneath the “perfect” family.

Not long afterward, Lucie places a panicked call to her long-term friend Anna (Morjana Alaoui). We learn early in the film that Anna has designated herself an unofficial protector and caretaker ever since Lucie was brought into the care home they shared as children. Anna is deeply dismayed that Lucie has killed the family, when she was only meant to stake them out and confirm they were responsible for her abuse. However, she answers the call and drives over to help her clean up.

It’s during this time that we’re given the first (and perhaps only) explicit acknowledgment of queer currents in the film. During the ongoing efforts to clean the scene of Lucie’s violence, the two young women hug, leading to Lucie kissing Anna’s neck. Anna then takes this as a cue to kiss Lucie on the mouth.

Admittedly, it’s unclear if this is a first kiss or if it’s happened before. It should also be stated that Anna’s timing is wildly off given how dissociative and troubled Lucie is, but the takeaway is clear and permeates the rest of the film. In simplest terms, Anna is rather unavoidably in love with Lucie. This understanding of Anna as a queer woman of color is unavoidably significant for the rest of Martyrs’ story.

As we soon learn, though, things are more complicated still. Lucie, a deeply traumatized child who’s grown into a deeply traumatized young woman, kills the Belfonds out of firmly rooted belief that they are responsible for the abduction, abuse, and torture she narrowly survived as a child. She soon discovers, though, that killing them — in an attempt to appease the survivor’s guilt she feels for leaving another woman behind as she escaped — hasn’t resolved anything. She ultimately takes her own life, in one of the more graphic sequences.

It’s this turn that shifts the movie from a home invasion movie into a grimly brutal psychological thriller, and brings to the forefront Anna as the film’s true protagonist. Anna, ensnared by shock and grief, finds herself unable or unwilling to leave the Belfond home. It’s this inertia, though, that leads her into discovering what lies beneath the shiny, heterosexual-nuclear exterior. She then learns that Lucie was absolutely right. In this sense, it takes the actions and the persistence of two queer women of color to dissect the myth of the perfect heterosexual family.

While what follows is incredibly hard to stomach, and in many ways alarmingly bleak. My feelings about the film are more complicated than a first glance might entirely allow. It’s not a happy film. It can’t be described as a happy ending. I certainly think there are some ways in which Martyrs has aged desperately badly. I would certainly hope that the same story told again now — no, not like in the watered-down, embarrassing attempt at an American remake — would have a better understanding of ways to tell this story without the prolonged brutalization of a queer woman of color’s body.

On the other hand, there’s something compelling in the fact that it takes the knowledge, experience, and sensibility (indeed, the witness) of a queer woman of color to expose the poisonous, exploitative abuses at the Belfond family’s root to the light. There’s something nearly uplifting that it’s Anna’s love for Lucie that steels her against giving into fear and suffering, lending her a transcendence that the straight, white, wealthy villains trying to exploit her have been unable to access or understand.

Despite my unexpectedly positive feelings about what Martyrs was trying to do, and what it ended up doing, I anticipate I’ll only be watching it once. It’s not even a film I can recommend, really. I don’t think it’s cruel in the way of some other films that could fall under the New French Extremity umbrella. However, its scenes of torture, self-harm, and suicide fall anywhere between hard to watch and outright triggering. Still, I understand why it has such significance within the horror canon, and why it’s been taken on as part of the queer canon in turn. I don’t regret watching it, either.