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Even before Lucie arrives holding a shotgun, we know that the perfect family in this huge suburban house are not entirely what they seem We know this because there is something quietly sinister about the rich, and in particular the rich, white nuclear family, whose protection of their mutual interests often calls to mind the way that words like ‘family’ are used in reference to the mob We know it, too, because we first saw Lucie fifteen years ago escaping from the basement of a slaughterhouse, shaven-headed and emaciated and covered in blood, and we are well-versed enough in the rules of cinema to know that women who escape — provided they have escaped early in the run-time — tend to come back for revenge She kills the father, then the mother — then the son, who hesitates when she asks whether he knew what his parents did to her a decade and a half ago, and then the daughter, who is fourteen or fifteen, and probably had not been born when Lucie ran, screaming and bleeding, from that basement When the family is dead, it is the mother’s corpse she shakes and rages at, as if to prove that what is happening is not about the father’s sins, but about a specifically feminine model of transference   These are the opening scenes of Pascal Laugier’s 2008 horror MARTYRS, a film usually classified as being part of the late-noughties genre known as the New French Extremity, written when Laugier was suffering from clinical depression The film posits the existence of a matriarchal cult that kidnaps adolescent girls, subjecting them to prolonged torture as a means of making them into seers and interpreters of a presumed afterlife What they hope for is undeniable proof of the existence of a God, whatever form that God might take  ‘You lock someone in a dark room,’ the cult’s leader, who goes by the name of Mademoiselle, later explains ‘And they begin to suffer You feed that suffering Methodically, systematically and coldly And make it last Your subject goes through a number of states After a