New French Extremity - Themes and Characteristics

Themes and Characteristics

While the New French Extremity refers to a stylistically diverse group of films and filmmakers, it has been described as " crossover between sexual decadence, bestial violence and troubling psychosis". The New French Extremity movement has roots in art house and horror cinema. According to film blogger Matt Smith, this tradition has recently "shoved its way very consciously into genre endeavors". Says Smith:

his new crop of horror is something altogether entirely different, concerned as much with gender identity as it is with sheer taboo-breaking of the screen images of bodies. The New French Extremity in particular is a wide-ranging set of films, encompassing art-house darlings like Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat (a filmmaker much more interested in sex than violence, or rather sex as violence) as well as those who might be deemed schlockmeisters by their detractors like Xavier Gens and Alexandre Aja.

Films belonging to the New French Extremity take a severe approach to depicting violence and sex.

Smith identifies five films that he believes primarily comprise a new wave of horror in France: High Tension, Ils, Frontiere(s), À l'intérieur and Martyrs. These films, he says, provide a "comprehensive snapshot of human anxieties about our bodies", both corporeally and socially. Within these works, Smith identifies two predominant themes: home invasion and, relatedly, a fear of the Other.

Pascal Laugier, director of the film Martyrs, has said that his work is connected to American torture porn efforts like the Saw series and director Eli Roth's Hostel, though he likens Martyrs to an "anti-Hostel". What makes his film different from its American counterpart, he says, is that Martyrs is about pain rather than torture. Per Laugier:

My film is very clear about what it says about human pain and human suffering. The film is only really about the nature and the meaning of human suffering. I mean, the pain we all feel on an everyday basis - in a symbolic way. The film doesn't talk about torture - it talks about the pain".

Mark Kermode, a film critic for the BBC and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, says Martyrs transcends torture-porn films like Hostel precisely because "it's about something". According to Kermode, "by the end of Martyrs, it turns out that the subject of transcendence and pain is absolutely what it's about".