Sintassi, semantica e pragmatica del martirio attorno a Martyrs di Pascal Laugier

Martyrs is a 2008 film by Pascal Laugier that has since gained a niche cult following of enthusiasts of this genre and is considered to have pioneered a kind of Nouvelle Vague in contemporary French horror films. Right from the title the category of martyr is central to the film, but Martyrs presents a significant re–articulation. While classical martyrdom was founded on faith, with the martyr who is such inasmuch as he/she is recognised by some and disavowed by others (and this is the perspective which substantiates his/her martyrdom) making a choice, the martyrdom in Martyrs is instead the fruit of an imposition in which faith is transliterated by the martyr to whoever makes her a martyr, be it religious or secular faith in some or other conviction. This significantly modifies the entire prospective apparatus. The film thus proposes an overturning of classical martyrdom while at the same time reflecting on it in all the semiotically relevant situations: syntactic, semantic, and even pragmatic, revealing in a programmed fashion the ideologies that are subject to martyrdom. The martyr in Martyrs is necessarily female, member of an impoverished class and tortured by a sect of prosperous individuals. Also, she is a martyr who becomes a sign in the Peircean sense and who, in the act of martyrdom, is presented as a heterotopia capable of using her language to mediate between here and elsewhere. Martyrs is thus a film founded on the hybridization of codes and featuring numerous gory images, but it is also part thriller, with features of the home invasion genre, part psychological drama, part revenge movie and part torture porn. Above all, however, it is a film whose nature is pre–eminently philosophical, woven in the close relationship between plot and image.