Martyrs is something of a horror milestone-a dire one to some, but a movie to be reckoned with all the same.

Martyrs has an intelligence and a dogged determination to do and to say what its predecessors could or would not.

it turns out to be concerned precisely with the nature and reception of extremity, posing uncomfortable questions about what it is that one really seeks in choosing to 'witness' scenes of horrific human abjection.

Written in a deep depression (and one can tell!), Martyrs is a work of bleak and unrelenting nihilism.