Martyrs

Pascal Laugier's endurance piece opens as a home-invasion revenge and then keeps going long after most films would have stopped, into territory that turned 'extreme cinema' into a marketing category studios could actually sell. A woman hunts the people she believes tortured her as a child, and the answer she finds is worse than the question. It is punishingly violent and, underneath the violence, dead serious about a metaphysical idea it refuses to make comfortable. Critics walked out, then wrote thousands of words about why they should not have. Do not put it on for a party.