2008 Movie vs 2016 Movie

The ’05 MARTYRS is a punishing film to watch. There is no lightness, it is pretty much 2 hours of a director inflicting as much emotional distress on the characters on screen and by osmosis the people watching. The violence is brutal and unflinching and the entire film has a nihilistic determination to not be pleasant in any way, shape or form. But even as writer/director Pascal Laugier rubs the audience’s nose in scene after scene of excruciating violence, he also manages to pull out real emotion from the unnaturally strong bond between the two girls and even the evil mastermind behind their torture.
Conversely, the remake doesn’t do much well at all. It fails to be nearly as in your face with the brutality as the original and instead delivers a sanitized, teen soap opera style horror movie despite attempting to do a scene-for-scene duplication of some parts of the film. There also were odd choices that really didn’t have to be done like making the father of the doomed family be the one who was working on the septic system instead of the mother like in the original. Or the aforementioned inclusion of an average little girl prisoner instead of the shocking and monstrous looking victim the original gave us.
The one thing that I do have to give the remake credit for and that I think was a better move than what was done in the original was not killing off Lucie so early in the film. By having both girls be captured and tortured by the group it created a better narrative. We got Anna working to not only save herself but to rescue Lucie while in the original all we got in the second half of the film was unrelenting torture scenes.
Advantage: MARTYRS ’08