Amen, Brother.

I watched this last week and I still think about. It really took all your assumptions about horror movies today and just stripped them away. You thought you knew what was going to happen and it just surprises you and goes to level you didn't know was there. And it was relentless, but not in a gory way, it was psychological. It's like you felt your own martyrization.

I honestly felt drained after this movie. Not since I saw Audition for the first time back in the 90's, before anyone really knew much about J-Horror did I feel so emotionally jarred, and that to me is great filmmaking. If I movie can invoke such a strong emotional response, then it has done it's job.

Movies like Martyrs change you, because it causes you to think deeper into what is going on and the message that film is telling you. It's not just entertainment, but a psychological and philosophical experience. This is a film, but you gain the knowledge and truth of the events without the consequences, which is truly remarkable.

OKayyyy I finally watched it.. annd I loved it. Everything about it. The first half was better for actual scares. Half way through the movie could have been the end of the movie and I would have been happy, but then it just kept getting better. I can describe what I liked about Martyrs for an hour, but I have no words for how I feel right now.

I cried (on camera) nearer to the end. It wasn't as intense as I thought it would be, but it was still really something, and I really wanted to stop watching 3 or 4 times, but I didn't. I thought getting up to get a much needed drink, or pausing to bawl my eyes out would ruin the huge buildup for the end and i am so glad I just stuck through it.

This movie was great i have watched it twice so far and it is goi9ng into my dvd collection for sure

I can easily see how people can express different opinions about Martyrs. The diference from one act to the next- it almost seemed like a colaboration between 2 directors. I really liked the begining and middle, but the ending felt long and dull. Not to say the ending was dull, just after answering and raising all the questions from the first half of the movie, any chance of maintaining an emotion impact had been spent (for me).

It was a really good movie, a strange, twisting and twisted tale that was also very fresh and original. If you have problems watching a woman get tortured, I would stay far away from this one.

I guess the main problem I have with the supposed "message" is this:

The secret society was trying to find out about the afterlife. They felt that at the final point of self-sacrifice, a martyr is able to see God, the afterlife, or whatever you want to call it. The problem is that the girls they torture and kill are not martyrs. They are purely victims. They are not dying for a cause that fills their heart, mind, and soul. They are dying because they has the unfortunate luck to be kidnapped by a cabal of lunatics.

Compare the monk who immolated himself to Anna being beaten repeatedly then having her skin peeled off. The monk died for a cause. Thích Quảng Đức was protesting the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam's Ngô Đình Diệm administration. He died with his heart and mind focused on bringing awareness to an injustice. What cause did Anna die for? What filled her heart leading up to her death? Terror, pain, and confusion. An utterly pointless death in all sense of the word.

Martyr's "message" would have made much more sense if the secret society members were the ones offering themselves up for the beating, torture, and ultimate death. But that wouldn't make as compelling of a movie now would it? Who would care about a bunch of pseudo-religious nutjobs torturing each other to death? There would be no reason to empathize with the victims because they wouldn't be victims. So the only route to go would be to kidnap innocents and torture/kill them so that the audience would actually care about their fate.

Martyrs was a valiant effort, but was weakened in my opinion by a hackjob of a plot device to explain and hour and a half of violence.

I wasn't impressed. It was smarter and better directed than, say, Hostel, but it still boiled down to "torture porn" in the end. It wasn't deep or smart enough to cause any great reflection or pose serious questions.

queued at Netflix

Loved it loved it loved it.:)

I have this one, but have yet to watch it. Maybe I will in the next couple of days, to see what all the fuss is about.

Whats 'torture porn'?