What Martyrs amounts to is a cheap mess, an attempt to adapt a work more focused on ideas into something designed to provide thrills and action, and the clash between the two modes is an ugly one.

| Original Score: 3.5/10 | May 24, 2019

Martyrs, surprisingly, isn't a complete misfire. It is bold enough to go in a different direction than the original, though it certainly doesn't best that film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 31, 2018

Not what you could call bad - just depressingly pointless - it follows similarly shrieky beats into unpleasant and underwhelming territory.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 2, 2017

This remake of the praised original shocker is frustrating in almost every aspect. [Full review in Spanish]

| May 6, 2016

Parasitic cinema, unimaginative, poorly thought, poorly narrated and just plain bad. [Full review in Spanish]

| May 6, 2016

Torture porn including minors and a confusing plot. [Full review in Spanish]

| May 5, 2016

Martyrs 2016 is an entertaining, fun and at times brutal horror film that will probably delight the casual horror fan.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 5, 2016

It's deeply unappetising - insipid for much of its length, before soullessly revelling in the agony for its final stretch.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 3, 2016

What's left after the gore is stripped away is a mildly bloody, meatless horror.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 31, 2016

It's ineptly directed and entirely misses the point of what Laugier was trying to achieve.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 29, 2016

The icky messiness that gave Laugier's film its visceral impact has been watered down and sanitised here, while the genuinely transcendent ending of the original is banally reduced to a eulogy for friendship.

| Feb 29, 2016

Goetz's version prefers to shy away from or downplay the brutality, which results in the rare case of a film suffering from gore deficiency.

| Original Score: C- | Feb 20, 2016

The two leads do their best with what they're given but in the end it all falls incredibly flat.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 4, 2016

"Martyrs" is soft and calculated and really rather dumb, not a fraction as effective as its source material on any level. Whatever purpose this film has for existing is indecipherable.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 2, 2016

While the end result isn't as disastrous as it could've been, it's predictably a more toothless effort that dulls the edges from start to finish.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 1, 2016

... there's not much inspiration here other than recycling familiar staples of the torture-porn subgenre.

| Jan 29, 2016

Martyrs is a film that wants you to believe it doesn't revel in its own depravity, but there's little evidence it has anything else on its mind.

| Original Score: 1.8/10 | Jan 28, 2016

Not without its own minor merits, but if it's a horror flick you're looking for, I'd just stick with the French film.

| Jan 26, 2016

Here is cinema without a purpose, without a point, without a reason to exist.

| Original Score: 2/10 | Jan 24, 2016

If you've never seen the 2008 version, many twists and turns of the new "Martyrs" might engross you in a superficial way. But why bother with a muted copy, when you can experience the balls-to-the-wall original?

| Original Score: D | Jan 23, 2016