European Horror Analysis

Martyr is a french film that was directed by Pascal Lauger and it came out in France in 2008. I couldn't find an opening sequence to it, so im going to be analysing the trailer that i found.

Mise En Scene
From the trailer it gives the audience a rough idea of the film but not too much to give the whole entire story away. The first scene that we see is of a young girl, around the age of about 10 or 11, chained to a chair and a shadowy figure enters the room. The next scene is then text, while this bit of text is on the screen there is non-diegetic music that fits in perfectly with the genre to create a scary atmosphere. Throughout the trailer there are a lot of scenes of torture, blood and eerie happenings. For example the scene where we see the girl running out of the building, covered in blood and screaming, we dont know whats happened to her, we can clearly see she has been hurt but we didn't see by who/what or why.
In the next few scenes we see some sort of investigation happening and we then connect it to the scenes that were seen following up. A man talks about a girl and torture and her name is 'Lucie' who it seems is now being looked after. Throught these scenes where its mostly talking (in French with subtitles), we can see that people have been hurt, people are planning to hurt and protect. Lucie seems to go back to the house where she was kept hostage and tortured and try to kill everyone there, the presumed detectives are asking another little girl about Lucie, she tells them that Lucie's scared and in other words wants revenge.
From this point forwards, most of the scenes involve a lot of violence, torture and abuse. We see a lot of blood and naked bodies fighting, for what? the audience don't know until the film is watched. We also see Lucie then killing the people in the house where she was captured and tortured but when she returns it turns out there is another girl in exactly the same position that she was, abused with a metal device attached to the head.

EditingMost of the scenes on the trailer are jump shots, at first there are scenes for a period of around 10-20 seconds long giving the audience an idea of the story, with these there are also scenes with text giving us some information towards the film. As the trailer carries on the jump cuts become to a faster and quicker pace to create a scary atmosphere and feel to the film.

Camera
Most of the shots are close ups, of people fighting, the gun pointing, the girl running and of people walking and talking. There was also extreme closeups such as when there was injuries that were made a point of focus, like the girl with the eye patch, there was an extreme closeup of her face focusing on the injury and her facial expressions. There was alos another close up of the girls face when she was running and we saw the blood coming from her face and also how scared she was.

SoundThere was non-diegetic music over the text scenes which gave the trailer the scary atmosphere to fit in with the genre, There was screaming from the girl and other people forward into the trailer, the sound of gunshots that was fired several times, the sound of metal being clanked and people talking in french.