Seeing the new French horror film Martyrs is like going trick-or-treating and ending up with a frayed philosophy text in your pillowcase. The writer-director, Pascal Laugier, has modernized the biblical story of Job—who lost everything, except his faith in God—by giving it the grindhouse treatment, grafting on the carnage of cheapo slashers. His heroine is stripped of her possessions, loved ones, skin, and this time around, her faith is despoiled, too. The French seem to think they can find art in anything, but is the beauty of this gnostically inclined torture-porn more than skin-deep?

Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) is kidnapped as a child, and abused by faceless captors. She is force-fed gruel—I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Soylent Green—and her only reprieve from the metal chair she’s chained to is getting pummeled by a bald brute. If she passes out from the blows, she’s slapped awake, and treated to more. She eventually escapes her captors, and is institutionalized, but the doctors can’t see the vindictive golem that slashes her wrists, and haunts her waking nightmares. Years later, she locates two of her captors who are now living an unassuming middle-class lifestyle. To appease her golem, Lucie pops them (and their children) full of lead, and her sympathetic girlfriend, Anna (Morjana Alaoui), helps her dispose of the bodies.

The golem returns for Lucie—but from Anna’s point of view, we see that it’s but a product of Lucie’s unhinged amygdala; Lucie loses her battle with the nonexistent demon, and slits her own throat. Anna, however, finds that the torture chamber of Lucie’s recollections is, in fact, very real. She rescues a denatured woman with a metal plate stapled to her skull, but is captured by the black-clad boogeymen-torturers who’d abducted Lucie; they imprison Anna for 17 years, and abuse her just as they had her girlfriend. After scene after scene of senseless, repetitive violence, Anna recalls advice from Lucie: let go. By the time her flesh is shorn, she’s photographed like Christ on the cross or Joan of Arc—her dulled-out eyes pointing heavenward. This has been her captors’ goal; the movie archaically defines a martyr as a witness, and Anna is their witness to l’autre monde. She whispers what she’s seen to the Mademoiselle in charge of the organization (Catherine Bégin), who looks like the chic, caked-up landlady of Mulholland Drive. A rotting gaggle of elderly aristocrats gathers to hear about what lies beyond the grave, but the Mademoiselle puts the barrel of a gun between her lips and recommends to one witness that he “keep doubting.”

Even after the gore-splattered success of other recent French horror flicks (such as the barbaric, but affably daft High Tension in 2003), and Hollywood’s own spate of factory-produced pukers (Saw, Hostel, et al), Laugier ran into difficulty getting Martyrs financed and produced. Censors slapped it with an unprecedented 18+ rating in its native country, which the filmmakers have appealed. One can see how this film could raise such objections: Despite all the choppy camerawork, we can see all the bloody chops. But the film’s spiritualism may make the ickiness run deeper than Lucie’s cuts. Martyrs is a “torture-porn,” all right, but I don’t think it conforms to the tenets of that genre as laid out by David Edelstein in New York magazine. The movie’s brutality is, in its way, cathartic, but we see it clearly from Anna’s sane point of view, and aren’t implicated in the boogeymens’ crimes. Martyrs also seems part of that international wave of movies in which crowd-pleasing violence is paired with warped philosophical underpinnings, and then decreed “deep” by critics who are easily distracted by clever visuals. This dubious genre includes the Kill Bill movies, The Dark Knight, and the absurd revenge-fantasy Oldboy from South Korea.

But perhaps there is a peculiar depth to Martyrs, a film which is more ambiguous—albeit less humorous—than all of the above movies (with the exception of The Dark Knight). Before the picture was played at the screening I attended, Laugier appeared in what looked to be a last-minute video introduction. Unlike the brutal movie, its director seemed an affable, limp-postured, but good-humored fellow; he smiled shyly when he said that he hoped that we in the audience would like his picture because he himself was on the fence. He recounted its production as if he had blacked out during the process; sometimes he’s proud of Martyrs, and sometimes he can’t believe he’s made a film like this. Is Laugier perhaps like Meursault when he harangues the chaplain at the end of The Stranger—embracing the ultimate uncertainty of life, but nearly driven mad by the revelation? Laugier’s “madness” would then translate into the marathon of suffering and gore and masochism that appears in his deeply agnostic movie. Through the torturers/evangelists, he shows us (consciously or not) how ultimately destructive and fruitless it is to try to know with certainty that which is unknowable. What we see is Laugier’s psychomachia refracted through his id.

But, as much as j’adore l’ambiguïté français, it’s easy to read too much into movies of this sort, particularly on the basis of psychiatric evaluation. However, it should be noted that Martyrs, with all of its entropy and eccentricity, never seems to use violence immorally. We are clearly put on the side of the lesbian lovebirds, and their torturers are sick and twisted in the manner of religious fanatics rather than evil stick-figures. The movie is a bloody scourge, and I can’t admit to enjoying its flagellation and mutilation, no matter how much some of the slasher-film junkies in the audience may find it funky or liberating. Laugier’s points could have been made in a better way, but I cannot deny Martyrs’ standing as a work of ’roid-raged art.