Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3-D début, is Grand Central Station in the age of L.A.X. Take this for an opening shot: Starting amid the snowflakes, above the 24-karat twinkle of the City of Lights, Robert Richardson’s camera bears down on a train-station platform, perks up like a groundstroke, and glides parallel to the rush-hour hustle like a hawk piercing the locomotive steam. It’s a bravura use of technology: The extra depth lends a heightened tension to the people and luggage so narrowly averted; and yet the motion is deifically smooth: Like a 3-D-simulator ride at Universal Studios—or riding shotgun on God’s road test. I prefer the latter because the shot pairs grandiosity, and mammoth cinephilic self-consciousness, with a thwack of surprise. We’re aware of the trick, but still fall for it: as if in the sway of an illusionist who’s eroding our skepticism. Considering that this is a movie about magic, it makes sense that, after this first wave of his wand, the flashy Scorsese we all know and love virtually disappears.

For a film of its scale, Hugo is remarkably small in scope. And despite being a movie about thaumaturgy, there’s nothing in it that can be classified as fantasy: Orks and aliens need not apply. The idea of an orphan squatting at a Victorian-gothic railroad station in 1931—an invisible waif among inattentive masses at a gilded gateway to the world—matches these ironies like P.B. with J. Having lost his clocksmith father (Jude Law) to a fire, the title character (Asa Butterfield, with eyes blue enough to blind Yves Klein and a name that conjures images of Oz under a dusting of Land O’Lakes) became the ward of a krunky uncle who looks, and probably smells, like the carny who hocked the Elephant Man. When the uncle, in turn, clocks out, he bequeaths to Hugo a responsibility more consequential than the boy knows: to keep the clocks ticking at a Parisian gare—the rafters of which he calls home—like a renegade intern without college cred to recoup. If Hugo can dodge the station’s Dickensian inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) artfully enough, he noshes on unguarded croissants, lifts tchotchkes and curios from the shop kept by mysterious Georges (Ben Kingsley)—he of the gloomy demeanor and bristly white chin—and tinkers with an equally enigmatic automaton that his dad didn’t live to fix. Georges gives Hugo a shoulder cold enough to melt Frosty, but his god-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz)—wearing a beret in 1931 but maybe Wayfarers in 2011—has a book-bred thirst for adventure too sharp to typify nerdiness. And Hugo’s totally crushing on her!

Especially as a family film, but even compared to a spectacular movie in roughly its same class—such as The Fall—Hugo is a remarkably complex work: Form, content, and theme are more tightly stitched together than a pair of designer jeans. It’s almost a living organism. But unlike most “self-aware” pomo schmorgasboards, it seems refreshingly unaware of its self-awareness, and even this seems thematically driven. In order to explain, I’ll have to raise the spoiler-alert flag—but since you’d have to be both a.) a complete film-history geek and b.) living deep underwater, sleeping with the fishes, for it to matter, I’ll fly the flag at half-mast. Georges is short for—wait for it—Georges Méliès, the magician and film pioneer behind the iconic A Trip to the Moon (1902). Embittered by the post-World War I disaffection with whimsy and what was yet to be branded “surreal,” he’s all but scrubbed away the accomplishments of his past. (For the record, I found this reveal to be weak tea when I expected a taurine jolt—not because it’s slightly ahistorical, but because, despite a cornucopia of evidence to the contrary, it makes Méliès seem like a selfish, small-minded jerk.) He’s unaware that his work is pored over by scholars like Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg, that fun cheekbone contortionist whose Grampa Munster mug on Boardwalk Empire recalls the Emil Jannings posters strewn about the movie palace here)—having faked his own death, he’s unaware that any of his work still exists. The only non-cellulose nitrate relic from the old days is the automaton, which turns out to be a literal key to the plot, the linchpin to a Méliès revival. (It’s also a masterstroke of production design, somewhere between the cool-countenanced King Tut’s sarcophagus and the mad scientist’s humanoid appliances in Edward Scissorhands.) I’m with David Edelstein in thinking that Scorsese’s film-restoration plea, set to Satie and Saint-Saëns, takes one out of the movie a bit—it’s a little Jehovah’s Witnessy. But that’s like caviling the birthday card a third-grader slips to the teacher who first sparks his sex drive.

If one looks too closely at its posthuman conflation of men and machines, the movie becomes a little creepy. For instance, Hugo dreams that he lifts up his shirt and finds the automaton’s iron ribcage where his chest should be. It’s a cyberpunk vision of puberty: a correlative to Méliès’s insistence that films are an iteration of dreams. (The urchin has another nightmare in which he’s nearly creamed by an oncoming train, and that one almost comes true—it’s based on a wreck that happened in real life—implying some kind of sixth sense on Hugo’s part or black magic on Méliès’s.) At the end, the cast is united in clinking cocktails at a party. But the camera tracks its way into the adjacent room, empty save for the automaton, which—yet another illusion—looks to have molded its mien to something like proprietary pride. And then there’s the full title of the Brian Selznick book on which John Logan’s delicate script is based: The Invention of Hugo Cabret—a sort of high-meta double entendre. However, taken as a metaphor for life—and, by extension, le cinéma—the notion that everybody has a function, like parts in a machine (i.e., a clock or camera), and Hugo’s function is to fix things (i.e., like a craftsman or artist—or filmmaker, who is both), is satisfying on a simple, atavistic level: akin to the clown’s even-this-pebble-has-a-purpose pep talk in Fellini’s La Strada (1954). Some of the imagery in Hugo—and this is a stretch—might be alluding to Welles’s The Stranger (1946). Since Welles, a noted magician, directed that thriller to show the studios that he could sell out with the best of ’em, his clocktower stood for style for its own sake. For Scorsese, as for the concourse clock at Grand Central, style has a function. Style is magic: It’s what makes a movie in which everything that happens could happen in real life feel like a fantasy epic. He’s pulled a $170 million dime out from behind our ears.

As a showman, with style to burn, Scorsese’s always been one of Welles’s aptest pupils; and he indeed includes some woozily Wellesian high-angle compositions that really pop in 3-D. But, aside from the opening and closing shots—and at least thrice, during Thelma Schoonmaker’s blood-pressure-boosting montages, when I reached, in vain, for a rewind button, to dissect them—the director vanishes into the mise-en-scène (for lack of a better word; honestly) like an old-timey studio-system ghost. That doesn’t mean his work isn’t splendid. Not just technically, but also with the cast: One upswing of Moretz’s eyebrow is worth a million frames of your average child prodigy; and Baron Cohen is a one-man Vaudeville duo. Happily, for a film with sequences that took nearly three months to digitally render, each coffee ring—from day one to day 89—shines forth, each tannin aglow. It’s easy to see why James Cameron talks up the 3-D in Hugo as if he were spinning a glowing Gizmodo editorial in his head: Scorsese doesn’t simulate real life, he enhances it. The depth of focus, especially in the exteriors, isn’t always tactile, in a naturalistic sense; it’s like a pop-up book: a marvelous yuletide fairy tale in Autochrome indigo and gold.

Hugo is, in sum, an authentic celebration of artifice. There’s something fully-trimmed-tree beautiful about it—transporting, even, since it manages to do this with the sort of generosity that a Quentin Tarantino would’ve hoarded for himself—and something that feels like a cold draft intruding on the Kahlua-and-hot cocoa toastiness that accompanied my egress from the theater. This auteur has successfully made the supreme Lionel toy-train set—with lots of money, and language suitable for children. But Scorsese’s message is not merely that life needs art; it’s that life and art cannot be disentangled. That fiction and reality, in this context, are inseparable. (“Happy endings only happen in movies,” Méliès, in one scene, avers; and then his life, in a movie, ends happily.) Usually, as in Synecdoche, New York, this is writ large. But Scorsese’s caméra stylo writes in invisible ink. It’s a kind of stylistic voodoo: a magic trick. Maybe I’m overreaching; maybe it’s a vibe that naturally results from a gaga hyper-proficiency that can itself only result from what I blushingly call love. Maybe Hugo carries the same message that Scorsese’s style conveys in all of his work, even when it’s expressed for different ends. Fantasy needs be nothing more than reality imaginatively experienced. Grand Central Station could be the end of the line.

Has ever an actor been more appropriately named than Christian Bale: two words that denote aery earnestness, a touch of the divine as well as a smack of malign, and even a hint of anguish? This Brit made a great American Psycho; but once he lost his mind, it looked as though he’d never recover it. Sanity appears to bore him. As The Dark Knight, he was torpid—perhaps because the director drooled over the banality of Heath Ledger’s evil and didn’t care a lick about good. But Bale looses focus, too; his wackadoodle dexterity was obvious in The Machinist, The Prestige, and Rescue Dawn—but he was spewing solar flares out of black holes. Despite being a cacophony of tweaky rhythms, his Dicky does have a core—a fallen brah’s braggadocio and a cracked sense of street humor. Mark Wahlberg’s exceptionally sweet and mannered performance as Micky seems to have grounded Bale; maybe Wahlberg’s selflessness tempered Bale’s masochism. Although Wahlberg doesn’t have any great scenes to himself, he conveys the saturnine softness of Brando; his up-turned mouth is always edging for a fight, but his eyes are far more conciliatory. It’s not a revelation by now, but he’s long since wiped Marky Mark off the marquee. He forces my mind to open wide enough to entertain the possibility that the next De Niro could be Justin Bieber.

The Fighter is a fine piece of work, though not a work of art. It doesn’t transcend its genre, like The Wrestler did (Aronofsky is listed as an executive producer); but it hits all the familiar notes in a way that wrings out more than the familiar sentiments. The first scene made me a little antsy: the -ickys careen through the hood—M- a little abashed; D-, ghetto blaster in hand, a fistic Pied Piper taking his town in tow—both on an apparent course for working-class Capra-corn. But the beauty of this picture is its immersion into local color; Russell is never above his subject—and neither is he looking at it from below, with reverence. I rolled my eyes when Dennis Lehane’s Mass-hole exceptionalism soiled Casey Affleck’s opening narration in the otherwise mild Gone Baby Gone; but these Lowellians are too tough, and, perhaps, too insular, to buy into that brand of bunk. The few daubs of style that the director allows himself—like the bouffant-topped Greek chorus that the boxers’ sisters comprise—may be a little too coarse, because he’s dealing with real people. (Otherwise, they’re not too different from the upper-crust caricatures in The King’s Speech or 8 1/2. They make for a witty “compile character,” cool-hearted though the effect may be.) The whole family reverts to obeisant putty whenever their materfamilias, Alice, is around. Melissa Leo—yet another appropriate surname!—gives Alice the squawk of an albatross and the pride of a lioness. Her children address her by name, but maybe they should call her “Sir”; her family is an enterprise, and she’s both queen and C.E.O. Russell even makes the music-to-loose-your-virginity-to-in-the-backseat-of-an-’86-Plymouth overcome any sports-montage stigmas: These sonic ’roids may be clichés, but they’re part of the guys’ pop culture.

There is a flipside. At one point, when Dicky’s in jail, he watches a nationally broadcast T.V. special about his decline: High on Crack Street. At first, he provides a sardonic commentary for his fellow inmates—who cheer his every jeer—but he comes to see that the joke is on him, and his family. This idea of seeing oneself reflected in a highly public mirror is as contemporary as it is fascinating; but it is probably the only interesting theme that the filmmakers develop. And they make a few goofs. We’re never sure when we are in the timeline, or how much time has passed since the last scene; and it seemed strange that Micky wasn’t awarded a moment with the ladies of his life—Alice and his girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams)—after winning the championship. But Russell had been suffering from Mark Romanek Syndrome—this is his first feature since I Heart Huckabees, six years ago—so maybe he needed something a little stiff (that is to say, conventional) to aid in his convalescence. His commercial strategy seems akin to his heroes’ Zen pugilism: clobber your opponent once he thinks you’re a goner. David Edelstein called The King’s Speech a “middlebrow masterpiece”; The Fighter is a nothin’-special knockout.

A pair of U.S. Marshals—Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo)—disembark a mist-shrouded ferry and set foot on Shutter Island, home of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a maximum-security prison in the Massachusetts Bay. One of the inmates—whom the chief psychologist, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), refers to as “patients”—has gone missing. Rachel (Emily Mortimer) returns, inexplicably and without a scratch. As storm clouds converge on the island, Teddy becomes increasingly paranoid; its jagged shores are littorally inescapable. The authorities have ignored his; they’ve taken his gun, withheld paperwork, and worst of all, the whole shebang seems to be under the sway of a former Nazi (Max von Sydow). Another Rachel appears (a razor-sharp Patricia Clarkson); the House Un-American Activities Committee’s name is dropped (it’s the McCarthy era—1954); and Teddy suffers from migraines and oracular dreams: visions of his wife (Michelle Williams)—who was supposedly burnt to a crisp by an arsonist who happens to be committed on the island—alternate with the suffering children of Dachau, which Teddy helped liberate as a G.I.

This is a gothic storm of a movie, and it’s awash with melodramatic touches and nods to old films noir. Yes, the Bernard Herrmannian horns honk at you like traffic in Midtown Manhattan; and, yes, the investigators wear fedoras; and Teddy’s subordinate calls him “Boss”; and the shrinks speak in slippery platitudes while wearing tweeds; and the inmates jump out of dark corners and give you the willies. But all these touches add to the dense, painterly texture of the film. According to A.O. Scott, Scorsese “forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing … to pull out from under you.” I didn’t feel “forced,” but found the rug perfectly sewn; each thread can be stitched back together. (It’s a rare pleasure to have thrillers like this exercise one’s mental needle.) Salon compares Shutter Island to a film by David Lynch—but Lynch’s meanings don’t conform to a logical structure; this can be reconstructed in a manner that is absolutely, pellucidly, meticulously sane. Is it a work of depth and subtlety? Well—definitely not subtlety. But does that mean that Scorsese is, as David Edelstein asserts, “farther from reality than his hero is”? Formal perfection is always a little supernatural. At any rate, I prefer this maniacal professionalism—Scrosese’s 40-year endeavor to blend opera with genre filmmaking—to that of A Serious Man, which was a snub to anyone who tried to parse the Coens’ threads.

In a film this dense and dynamic, consistency can be both miraculous and conservative. When Scott—whose evaluation is uncharacteristically tsk-tsk-tsky—calls Shutter Island “airless,” I can understand why: There isn’t much breathing room. He and Edelstein, critics whom I admire, fall into rubrics a.) and c.). I can only offer, without risk of being called a spoilsport, part of why I’m still sympathetic to b.). Scorsese is no stranger to madness; his work has always been deliriant, and his oeuvre is spiked with psychopaths. Taxi Driver is one of the best character studies ever financed by Hollywood, and one of the most vertiginous downward spirals. But while you’re watching it, you know that cabbie is a little bit loopy. Watching Shutter Island, you may start to wonder about yourself. The third-act revelation may not be entirely original, but I was so caught up in the cobwebs of rationalization that it had the bite of a spider. (Perhaps some willful gullibility is required for the venom to take effect.) Shutter Island doesn’t connect to societal upheaval the way Taxi Driver and Mean Streets did; or celebrity culture the way The King of Comedy did; or the Patriot Act the way The Departed did. But it might prompt you to examine your own susceptibility to delusion; it might induce you to think like a madman.

When we first meet Teddy, DiCaprio’s Boston accent reminded me of those Red Sox window stickers with Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) pissing on the Yankees logo. In other words, he comes on a little strong. DiCaprio improves, however, when his anger downshifts to desperation. Ruffalo has a face that belongs in old movies; his swarthy, sympathetic visage lends itself to wounded trust. Kingsley and von Sydow never lose their composure in the sort of roles that the aging John Carradine once took on. Although he doesn’t have much screen time, Ted Levine plays the warden in such an impishly disarming way that he seemed to be a medieval demon tunneling his way inside Teddy’s bone marrow; he’s like a just-one-of-the-guys microcosm of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. If he’s the devil on Teddy’s shoulder, Williams’s wife is the angel—and she’s a banshee of a femme fatale. With her flowing yellow hair, Williams has a soft, otherworldly, ambiguous presence; when she crumbles to dust, it seems in character.

Where does the c.) come in and mingle with the b.)? I think Elbert Ventura is on to something when he argues that Scorsese idolizes the studio-system “hacks” who made all sorts of popular genre pictures but squeezed in enough of themselves to form a watermark on the reels. This from a director whose intimate masterworks would have left John Ford or Howard Hawks scratching their heads; at the time, his style was like nails in their coffins. And yet, even then, their industrial style informed his personal vision. As far back as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Scorsese’s been showing off his prowess on their very own sets. Now that he’s finally landed as an “establishment” figure, his watermark is getting diluted in direct variation with the flood of money now being poured on him from the studios—or so the argument goes. But, on the count that Shutter Island is “impersonal … and a waste of time,” I disagree.

Maybe I didn’t feel the “insistent throb of a sensibility burning to get something out of [Scorsese’s] system,” but I felt that Shutter Island was more than a fanboy’s puzzle. It’s a plunge into a man’s moral breakdown—a coming to terms with the plaque that accumulates in a person’s soul—that’s not unfamiliar in the filmmaker’s work. But it was done in such a way that I’ve never before seen in his work. The wounds might have been inflicted by pop-psych stimuli, amplified and sensationalized enough to reach a mainstream audience (Laeta Kalogridis’s script is based on a bestseller by Dennis Mystic River Lehane); but the way Scorsese explores these feelings indicates a personal affinity with his subject, even if that subject is of less interest than those who’ve come before. I think it’s telling that some critics complain that this movie has delusions of grandeur while others believe it’s an impersonal pot boiler. Sure, at 67, Scorsese may be at low ebb; statistically speaking, his best days are probably behind him. But, as Ventura concedes, Scorsese’s low ebb is high tide for most blockbusters.

The story is based on Kurt Eichenwald’s reportage about Mark Whitacre, a division president at the agricultural giant Arthur Daniels Midland. Scared that he may become a scapegoat, he tattled on the international price-fixing ring that he and the other executives habitually partook in; inadvertently, however, he blew the whistle on his own spate of fraudulent behavior. To the F.B.I., he presented himself as a down-home American hero—a scientist in the corrupting sphere of big-time corn-syrup malfeasance—and now he’s being embodied in a big-time movie by a big-time star, Matt Damon. But Damon has 30 extra pounds swishing between his hips, and his girth is accompanied by equally unflattering glasses, a hot-mess toupee, and a porn-star mustache that seems vintage 1973 (though the story is set between 1992 and 2006). He isn’t fat, but he’s squat, and Damon stays proficiently in character, showing off his inner nebbish with a ducky gait, nervous toothiness, and some Midwestern twang in his voice. Damon does well; he’s always been a likable actor because his pretty-boy face betrays an innate self-effacement. I don’t think he’s trying for condescension here, but his self-deprecation leaves little else left beneath the mannerisms. It’s as if Whitacre’s self-deception had depleted his own soul, reduced him to instinctual nervousness. Damon is probably up against the same thing that Christian Bale was in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, in which he flailed about portraying an essentially soulless character—also based on a real person.

Some artists, wisely, rely on intuition, and let their feelings develop as they work through a project. I think Soderbergh, and the screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns (who wrote a very divergent part for Damon in the Bourne movies), are trying to be nonjudgmental. But forced objectivity can become like a condom that reins in artistry; Soderbergh has pulled the wool over our eyes, but his seem wrapped in sheepskin, too. And he doesn’t have the gift that Terry Gilliam (or Rian Johnson) has for discomfiting us and then making us laugh at our confusion. Brazil was about a functionary confronted by an insuperable bureaucracy, as shown from the individual’s point of view; in The Informant!, we see a nutty individual befuddle multiple bureaucracies. We look at Whitacer’s foibles and ask ourselves, “Is he serious?” But the consequences are shown to us as paperwork. The filmmakers’ objectivity is conceptual: It serves the big payoff. But they loose sight of the details—the little jokes that make the payoff worthwhile. We get too many revelations in dry staff meetings, where talented comedians are stuck speaking in jargon, and seem shackled to prim business suits.

Having the likes of Patton Oswalt, Candy Clark, Tony Hale, and even the Smothers brothers (who embody the era that the psychedelic production design misleadingly invokes) play it straight is indeed a joke; but after our initial recognition of these misplaced luminaries, we stop laughing. Melanie Lynskey gives us the cream filling of a candy-coated American wife with tender shades of melancholy; Scott Bakula, as an F.B.I. agent, seems immanently loose and sympathetic (with a droopy, Bush-like visage that indicates incompetence); and it’s fun to see Joel McHale (of The Soup on E!) use his smarminess to evoke an Arrow-collar G-man of the J. Edgar Hoover years (which, again, do not encompass those in which the movie is set). But this is Damon’s show—from Whitacre’s eyes. (Does he need Visine? Maybe that’s why everything’s so dry…) Burns’s most ingenious contribution is the voiceover—a free-association scat which Damon yammers off hilariously. But the only other sources of humor are a few mildly timed espionage slip-ups, the escalating circumstances, and the way we foolishly, instinctively trust the whistleblower every time, only to have him let us down yet again. The Informant! is less a black comedy than a sunny-skies downer. The jokes are all in the filmmakers’ heads.

I don’t mind that Soderbergh toys with us so much as I mind how he does it—boringly. We hear a series of exorbitant figures accompanied by the shocked expression of some power-at-be, and the cheekily ironic musical equivalent on the soundtrack. I think we’re supposed to end up confused about how we feel about Whitacre, but we just feel miffed; the whole movie has betrayed us, giving us a chameleon instead of a character. Soderbergh’s lack of conviction—except in tricking the audience—seems to have left everyone drained. Some of the filmmakers’ attitudes leak out, but the seepage is indiscriminate, so it only leads to more flippancy. Part of Soderbergh wants us to say, “Whitacre sure turned the tables on us!” But other parts of him imply “Shit, did he really just do that to himself?” or “Big business screws with us all!” The film becomes a Rorschach test for critics, a tease to those banking on Soderbergh’s reputation for having something to say.

For instance, Manohla Dargis, in the New York Times, believes that anti-corporate “anger fuels The Informant!, giving it its pulse and reason for being,” whereas David Edelstein, of New York magazine, thinks the filmmakers are “utterly uninterested in corporate misbehavior and its ramifications,” and thus present “Whitacre as the wacked-out soul of corporate America.” Perhaps at the heart of this is Soderbergh’s own claim that he “wasn’t really interested in hearing what everyone involved [in Whitacre’s case] thought [Whitacre’s] actions meant. … I wanted people to be immersed in what it was to be like him.” But I think Soderbergh has mistaken how Whitacre sees himself with the educated-liberal audience’s view of Whitacre, and the director’s own subjective feelings toward the man. The voiceover is inconsistent—are we hearing his thoughts, or is he talking to us? There’s also the matter of the music (Marvin Hamlisch’s score evokes the kitsch of multiple eras) and the photography (which is blown out and orangey—as if soaked in corn syrup). All the elements seem to be scoring satirical points off Whitacre; did the filmmakers think this man saw himself as a stereotype—Mr. Phony-Baloney American Dream?

In Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures, a chronicle of Soderbergh’s generation of independent filmmakers, the director recalls the genesis for his sex, lies, and videotape: “I was involved in a relationship with a woman in which I was deceptive and mentally manipulative. … I just became somebody that, if I knew them, I would hate.” According to Biskind, “Had [Soderbergh] been able, he would, he said, have joined a twelve-step program for recovering liars.” I think Whitacre’s story—that of an intelligent family man who, on one level, is an earnest do-gooder, and on another, a self-destructive double-, triple-, quadruple-crosser—must have impacted Soderbergh on a very personal level. The Informant! could be an autobiographical misfire: Soderbergh’s cold distance may reflect his own ambivalence about liars—his own self-reproaches back him away from his subject. You leave feeling parched, and that’s the punchline. Fun, right? It’s a shame, if that’s the case; Soderbergh pulls off the unreliable narrator, but, with his talent, he could have pulled off a lot more. The story must have glowed on paper like a cornfield at sunset. But once the Americana corn husks are shucked away, all that’s left are kernels desiccated by the drought.

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 (except when the innocent teenagers are murdered). 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.