The American remake of Martyrs changes the story but lessens the impact

This much can be said for the new remake of Martyrs: It’s efficient. Clocking in at under 90 minutes, the film proceeds at a rapid clip, never lingering too long on any one scene, or dragging out a single shot beyond the minimal time needed to achieve its purpose. Unfortunately, in goosing the momentum, the creators of the film have lost the soul of what was essential to this horrific tale. Indeed, the original movie might be the only film lumped under the banner of “extreme horror” (or, less charitably, “torture porn”) to truly and narratively justify the argument that extending brutal scenes of violence and abuse is the whole point. (The A.V. Club previously referred to it as “the torture-porn movie to end all torture-porn movies.”)
The original French film, written and directed by Pascal Laugier, has attained cult status as one of the most grueling and upsetting of the recent era of horror cinema that nonetheless deserves critical plaudits—more Audition than A Serbian Film, in short. Laugier is a provocateur with a fondness for narrative twists coupled with weighty political and philosophical themes, as demonstrated (to solid but lesser effect) in both his debut House Of Voices and more recent English-language thriller The Tall Man. His Martyrs is in part an endurance test, a film that dares you to look away from its disgusting images even as it invites you to grapple with a story in which suffering plays a pivotal role. In reworking it for the no-subtitles English audience, that element of endurance is gone, and with it, the gut-punch of an ending which felt so earned is excised, in order to hurriedly wrap up a plot that now feels more trashy than weighty.