Is it because it's French it's viewed as more than Torture Porn?

I honestly think that if the film was American then it wouldn't get the attention it has, and people wouldn't look so deeply into it. Just like Hostel is rated as simply torture porn by most people. If it were French then people may have explored the human psyche elements of the film a little more and the comments section would have been far more interesting.

Being French means some people assume there is more to Martyrs than an attempt to try, and fail in my case, to shock the viewer with the nature of the psychological and physical torture. I also realise that other people find deeper meaning to this film for other reasons than it being French, just to show i don't mean ALL people who think it's deep are only doing so subconsciously because it is a foreign film.

The film had very little in the way of strong dialogue and/or the back story of the perpetrators. If this is a story with torture porn and to be compared to other torture porn for the writing, then at least you get a true idea of what the perpetrators are all about in Saw and Hostel. I honestly thought Hostel had more going for it than Martyrs. Hostel is more ridiculous than Martyrs but it did at least manage to make me think about the premise and make me squirm at times with torture. There are no scenese that will stay ith me from Martyrs. The premise was certainly stronger for Hostel than Martyrs imho as the whole cult thing was weak with no backstory at all.

Martyrs felt like a one and a half hour build up to me and I was waiting for a big, shocking ending. But no, the ending was ambiguous and dull. The style of ending that has been done time and time before. It left me with nothing to go on. It's pointless guessing what Anna said to the old cow as it could have been anything, which is why i'd have liked a definitive answer on this occasion.

And a final thought... we didn't really see much of what Lucie went though when she was chained. We don't know which stage of the torture she'd managed to reach. Just another thing that disappointed me, as I assumed we'd discover more and more throughout the film about what happened to he before she escaped. We saw her get slapped and then get away, pretty much. The other two tortured girls we saw other than Lucie and Anna had clearly suffered far worse tortures...