Blood Rites and Flesh Revelations: Martyrs and Raw Redefine French Extremity
In the raw underbelly of French cinema, two films carve open the human form to expose the soul’s darkest agonies.
Paschal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) and Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) stand as towering achievements within the New French Extremity, a movement that shattered cinematic taboos with unflinching depictions of violence, transformation, and the body’s betrayal. These films do not merely horrify; they interrogate the boundaries of endurance, empathy, and enlightenment, forcing audiences to confront the visceral truths beneath civilised veneers.
- Martyrs transforms revenge into a metaphysical quest, where torture becomes a gateway to otherworldly revelation, blending Catholic martyrdom with modern sadism.
- Raw reimagines coming-of-age through cannibalistic urges, merging adolescent awakening with grotesque body horror in a tale of inherited appetites.
- Together, they exemplify French Extremity’s evolution, from spiritual transcendence to primal instinct, influencing global horror while sparking debates on cinema’s ethical limits.
Roots in the Extremity Revolution
The New French Extremity emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a provocative response to polished Hollywood horror, drawing from the provocative traditions of European arthouse while amplifying graphic intensity. Films like Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002) and Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell (2004) laid the groundwork, but Martyrs and Raw elevated the subgenre by intertwining extreme physicality with profound psychological and philosophical inquiries. Laugier’s work channels the ascetic rigours of religious iconography, whereas Ducournau’s pulses with the feral energy of biological imperatives. This shared lineage positions both as heirs to a cinema that demands active participation from viewers, repelling passivity through sheer sensory overload.
Contextually, France’s film industry in the 2000s grappled with funding pressures and a desire to reclaim avant-garde status post-Cannes dominance. Directors turned inward, excavating national traumas from colonial legacies to secular anxieties. Martyrs premiered at festivals amid controversy, its unflinching portrayal of prolonged suffering prompting walkouts and bans in some territories. Raw, arriving nearly a decade later, rode a wave of renewed interest in female-led horror, with Ducournau citing influences from Cronenberg to fairy tales. Both films underscore Extremity’s punk ethos: reject complacency, embrace discomfort.
Productionally, challenges abounded. Laugier shot Martyrs on a modest budget, relying on practical effects and non-professional locations to heighten authenticity. Ducournau, for Raw, employed veterinary consultants to depict animal slaughter realistically, blurring documentary and fiction. These decisions amplified their impact, proving that Extremity thrives on resourcefulness rather than spectacle.
Martyrs: From Vengeance to Apotheosis
Martyrs opens with Lucie fleeing childhood torment, her psyche fractured by institutional abuse. Reunited with childhood friend Anna, she enacts brutal revenge on the family she holds responsible, unleashing a chain of escalating atrocities. As the narrative pivots, the perpetrators reveal a cult obsessed with inducing martyrdom to glimpse the afterlife. Anna, thrust into their torture chambers, endures flaying and beatings in a bid for transcendence. Morjana Alaoui delivers a harrowing performance as Anna, her expressions cycling through terror, resolve, and ethereal detachment.
The film’s structure bifurcates into revenge thriller and philosophical ordeal, subverting genre expectations. Early sequences pulse with slasher kinetics—axes cleaving flesh, blood spraying in arterial arcs—before slowing to methodical cruelty. Laugier draws from Catholic hagiographies, where saints like Saint Catherine faced the wheel unflinchingly, positing suffering as a purifying fire. Yet, the film’s bleak twist denies easy catharsis; revelation arrives not to the martyr but to her tormentors, questioning voyeurism in horror consumption.
Symbolism saturates the mise-en-scène: sterile white chambers evoke surgical theatres and purgatory, shadows elongating under harsh fluorescents to symbolise encroaching oblivion. Sound design weaponises silence punctuated by whimpers and cracks of bone, immersing viewers in Anna’s isolation. This sensory austerity contrasts Hollywood’s bombast, aligning Martyrs with Extremity’s intellectual core.
Raw: The Carnal Hunger of Youth
Raw follows Justine, a vegetarian veterinary student, initiated into sorority rituals via raw meat consumption. This awakens a latent cannibalism, manifesting in compulsive flesh-eating that ravages her body and relationships. Garance Marillier embodies Justine’s arc from repression to ravening abandon, her physical transformation—lip-biting, finger-gnawing—mirroring psychological fracture. Sister Alexia, played by Ella Rumpf, amplifies familial tensions, their bond devolving into eroticised violence.
Ducournau structures the film as a grotesque bildungsroman, where puberty’s metaphors literalise into devoured limbs and vomiting organs. Veterinary school settings ground the horror in anatomical realism: dissections parallel Justine’s self-consumption, highlighting meat’s dual status as sustenance and taboo. Unlike Martyrs‘ asceticism, Raw revels in tactility—close-ups of quivering flesh, saliva-slicked bites—evoking the abject pleasures of the forbidden.
Narrative propulsion stems from escalating incidents: a hazing gone wrong, sibling rivalry exploding into fratricide-lite. Ducournau infuses queer undertones, Justine’s desires blurring gustatory and sexual appetites, challenging heteronormative coming-of-age tropes. Festival fainting spells underscored its potency, yet the film critiques rather than revels, probing inheritance of primal drives.
Flesh as Battlefield: Shared Body Horror
Both films weaponise the body as metaphor, but diverge in execution. Martyrs treats flesh as expendable vessel for soul-flight, Anna’s flayed form a canvas for transcendence. Practical effects—latex skins peeled in layers—achieve grotesque verisimilitude without CGI gloss. Raw, conversely, fetishises mutation: rashes erupting, nails splintering, evoking The Fly‘s metamorphic dread. Ducournau consulted prosthetics experts for seamless integration, her camera lingering on textures to provoke nausea.
Thematically, they converge on violation’s aftershocks. Lucie’s scars map psychic wounds, mirroring Justine’s inherited hunger, suggesting trauma’s transgenerational echo. Gender dynamics sharpen the blade: female protagonists endure patriarchal gazes, reclaiming agency through extremity. Laugier punishes female bodies to metaphysical ends; Ducournau eroticises them, subverting male-gaze conventions.
Class undertones simmer beneath. Martyrs‘ cult comprises bourgeois elites seeking afterlife privilege, evoking French revolutionary guillotines flipped upward. Raw‘s academic milieu exposes entitlement’s fragility, meat rituals democratising savagery.
Spiritual Crucible Versus Primal Pulse
Where Martyrs ascends to theology, Raw descends to biology. Laugier interrogates faith’s cost, cultists rationalising sadism as science-religion hybrid. Anna’s potential martyrdom inverts victimhood, her gaze piercing veils—a nod to Bataille’s eroticism of excess. Ducournau, influenced by evolutionary psychology, frames cannibalism as atavistic relapse, Justine’s urges evolutionary holdovers clashing with modernity.
This divergence reflects directorial visions: Laugier’s Catholic upbringing infuses eschatological dread; Ducournau’s veterinary background grounds horror in animalism. Yet both reject redemption arcs, endings lingering in ambiguity—Martyrs‘ whispered secret, Raw‘s unresolved feast—denying narrative consolation.
Performances amplify contrasts. Alaoui’s stoic endurance anchors Martyrs; Marillier’s feral spasms propel Raw. Supporting casts—Catherine Begin’s icy matriarch, Laurent Lucas’s conflicted Adrien—add emotional layers, humanising extremity.
Sensory Assaults: Craft of Dread
Cinematography distinguishes their assaults. Laugier’s desaturated palette drains vitality, long takes trapping viewers in agony. Jimmy Laubier Lindroos’s Steadicam work creates claustrophobia, corridors narrowing like veins. Ducournau’s Ruben Impens employs vibrant hues—reds pulsing like blood—dynamic tracking shots capturing frenzy. Both master negative space: Martyrs‘ voids evoke divine absence; Raw‘s crowds isolate Justine’s alienation.
Soundscapes devastate. Martyrs favours diegetic minimalism, flesh-rending amplified to orchestral horror. Raw‘s score by Jim Williams throbs with industrial beats, syncing to mastication rhythms. These elements forge immersive empathy, blurring screen and skin.
Enduring Echoes and Fractious Legacies
Martyrs birthed American remakes and inspired torture porn’s philosophical wing, influencing The Invitation. Banned in France initially, it ignited censorship debates. Raw propelled Ducournau to Titane, Palme d’Or glory, mainstreaming Extremity via A24. Both endure via cult followings, streaming revivals dissecting their provocations.
Culturally, they challenge horror’s masochistic appeal. Do we seek purgation or prurience? Their influence ripples to Midsommar‘s folk horrors, proving Extremity’s exportable rigour.
Director in the Spotlight: Pascal Laugier
Pascal Laugier, born in 1977 in Paris, France, emerged from a cinephile background steeped in horror classics and philosophical cinema. A self-taught filmmaker, he studied literature before diving into shorts that caught festival attention. His feature debut, Saint Ange (2004), a ghostly period chiller set in a haunted orphanage starring Virginie Ledoyen, showcased his atmospheric command and interest in institutional evil, earning cult status despite modest release.
Martyrs (2008) cemented his notoriety, its bold extremism drawing from personal fascinations with religion and suffering. Laugier has cited influences like Ingmar Bergman, Clive Barker, and Salò, blending them into a signature style of moral horror. Crossing to Hollywood, he directed The Tall Man (2012), a Jessica Biel-starring abduction mystery that pivoted toward thriller territory, exploring rural paranoia.
Later works include The Secret (2015), a ghostly family drama with genre bends, and Incident in a Ghostland (2018), revisiting home invasion with Taylor Swift’s mother in a meta-narrative of trauma. Laugier returned to French roots with Reminiscence projects and scripted others, maintaining a oeuvre fixated on the supernatural’s intersection with human frailty. Interviews reveal his punk rejection of compromise, advocating horror as philosophical tool. Upcoming, he helms The Last Journey, promising further depths.
Filmography highlights: Saint Ange (2004)—haunted asylum dread; Martyrs (2008)—transcendental torture opus; The Tall Man (2012)—small-town vanishings; The Secret (2015)—possession familial rift; Incident in a Ghostland (2018)—writer’s nightmare assault; plus documentaries and scripts like Now You See Me 2 contributions. Laugier’s career trajectory underscores resilience amid controversy, his films enduring as benchmarks of thoughtful extremity.
Actor in the Spotlight: Garance Marillier
Garance Marillier, born 4 February 1991 in Senlis, France, trained at the prestigious Cours Florent drama school, honing a naturalistic intensity suited to transformative roles. Her breakthrough arrived with Raw (2016), embodying Justine’s visceral evolution with raw physicality that propelled her to international notice, earning César nominations and festival acclaim.
Early television work in The Team (2015) showcased ensemble skills, but cinema beckoned strongly. Post-Raw, she starred in Ava (2017), Léa Mysius’s coming-of-age tale of rebellion and disability, displaying emotional range. School’s Out (2018) saw her in a tense thriller ensemble, navigating psychological suspense.
Marillier’s versatility shines in Clash (2018), a docudrama on Egyptian elections amid chaos, earning her broader dramatic cred. She headlined The Third War (2020), a political thriller on far-right infiltration, and Gold (2022) opposite Peter Coyote in a heist saga. Upcoming: La Passion de Dodin Bouffant (2023), a culinary romance with Juliette Binoche, signalling arthouse expansion.
Notable accolades include Most Promising Actress César nods, and she advocates for female-led stories. Filmography: Raw (2016)—cannibal student odyssey; Ava (2017)—wheelchair-bound defiance; School’s Out (2018)—youthful conspiracy; Clash (2018)—riot-torn van drama; The Third War (2020)—undercover extremism; Gold (2022)—Yukon gold rush betrayal; TV: The Team (2015), Les Grands (2016-19). Marillier’s trajectory marries horror roots with diverse challenges, her presence commanding empathy amid turmoil.
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Bibliography
Beaujon, P. (2017) New French Extremity: Art Cinema Confronts the Real. Edinburgh University Press.
Bradshaw, P. (2017) ‘Raw review – a stomach-churning take on teen trauma’, The Guardian, 5 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/05/raw-review-stomach-churning-take-on-teen-trauma (Accessed: 15 October 2023).
Ducournau, J. (2018) Interview: ‘Directing Raw was like directing an animal’, Sight & Sound, British Film Institute, May.
Fraser, D. (2010) ‘Transcendence Through Suffering: The Philosophy of Martyrs’, Film International, 8(4), pp. 45-62.
Laugier, P. (2009) ‘On Making Martyrs’, Fangoria, Issue 285, pp. 22-28.
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