Cinema review
Directed by Pascal Laugier
Starring Morjana Alaoui, Mylene Jampanoi, Catherine Begin
Release Date 27 March 2009 (UK)
DVD release date (region 2): 24 May 2009

15 years after being tortured in a dingy basement cellar, a young woman locates some of her former protagonists and kills them. Then things get really nasty…

Imagine if your best friend went psycho with a shotgun and slaughtered an entire family inside a statuesque country mansion before slitting her own throat. Then you happened upon the house’s legendary underground torture chamber and a barely-living, bruised, bloodied and brain-damaged female in the basement.

Do you…

1) Call the police immediately? After all, you never killed anyone.

2) Leg it?

3) Fall asleep for a little bit, phone your mum and fail to even change your day-old, bloodstained vest? After all, no one is going to come snooping and it’s not as if you’ve just discovered a major crime scene or anything…

If you answered ‘3’ then congratulations – you too would end up being caught, crippled and cut-to-ribbons by an underground cult intent on finding out what lies beyond death (at least that’s the narrative excuse for Laugier’s perverse glee at stripping his beautiful leading lady down to her underwear and smashing seven shades of hell out of her for 20-or-so minutes). Otherwise, you’re probably too smart to waste time on this pathetic torture-porn outing. Calum Waddell

VERDICT: 4/10
Morally dubious (the director even closes up on an abused girl’s bare breasts twice just before flaying her alive) and surprisingly dull, Martyrs is just a cynical cry for attention and controversy. Worryingly, some critics seem to have fallen for it…

Click here to read the DVD review of Martyrs!