Martyrs

MARTYRS

In 1971, a young girl, Lucie Jurin, escapes from a disused abattoir where she has been imprisoned and physically abused for more than a year. The perpetrators and their motivations remain a mystery. Lucie is placed in an orphanage, where she is befriended by a young girl named Anna Assaoui, who quickly discovers that Lucie believes that she is constantly being terrorized by a ghoulish creature – a disfigured, emaciated woman. Even so, Anna comforts Lucie every time she has a nightmare. Fifteen years later, Lucia bursts into the home of an apparently normal family, the Belfonds – Gabrielle, her husband, and their children Antoine and Marie – and kills them all with a shotgun. Elsewhere, Anna waits for Lucie. Although Anna knows that Lucie believes the Belfonds are the people responsible for her childhood abuse, she is horrified when Lucie tells her that she has killed them. Upon arriving at the house, Anna discovers that Gabrielle is still alive and tries to help her escape, but Lucie bludgeons Gabrielle to death. Lucie is again attacked by the scarred creature, but Anna only sees Lucie hurting herself, the “creature” is nothing more than a psychological manifestation of Lucie’s guilt for leaving behind another girl who was also tortured with her as a child. Lucie, realizing that her insanity will never leave her, commits suicide.
The next day, Anna, still at the family’s house, telephones her mother, from whom she has been estranged, their conversation implies that Anna suffered abuse from her parents as a child. Suddenly, Anna hears some noises and discovers a secret underground chamber in the living room. Imprisoned within is a horribly tortured young woman named Sarah, who proves that Lucie was right about the family. Anna helps Sarah escape, but a group of strangers arrive and gun Sarah down. Captured, Anna meets their leader, an elderly lady referred to as Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle explains that she belongs to a secret philosophical society seeking to discover the secrets of the afterlife through the creation of “martyrs.” Their experiments inflict systematic acts of torture upon young women in the belief that their suffering will result in a transcendental insight into the world beyond this one. Mademoiselle also believes the world is divided into victims (people who can’t hold tortures and fall into madness), like Lucie and Sarah), and martyrs (people who “accept” tortures and transcend). Anna becomes the group’s latest subject.t After a period of being beaten and degraded, Anna hallucinates a conversation with Lucie, and is later told she has progressed further than any other test subject and has reached the “final stage.” She is flayed alive and survives the procedure, entering a state that is “euphoric” and likened to achieving transcendence. Mademoiselle arrives eagerly and Anna whispers into her ar. Members of the society gather at the house to learn the insights Anna shared with Mademoiselle. As he waits, Mademoiselle’s assistant asks her if what Anna said was clear. Mademoiselle says yes, then asks him if he could imagine what comes after death. When he says no, she tells him to “keep doubting” before producing a handgun and committing suicide. The film ends with a shot of Anna on the table, in a catatonic state.
Director Pascal Lauguier follows his 2004 thriller House of Voices with this relentlessly brutal tale of a girl who suffered unimaginable abuse as a young child, and the unspeakable horrors that unfold when she arrives at an isolated cab in the woods fifteen years later. The story begins as the young badly battered Lucie – obviously the victim of inhuman abuse – is hospitalized after somehow managing to escape her sadistic captors. Nearly catatonic after her life-altering ordeal, Lucie only manages to become functional again as a result of her friendship with Anna, a fellow abuse victim who selflessly reaches out to the badly damaged girl. Fifteen years later, Lucie guns down an entire family in cold blood. Is Lucie seeking belated vengeance against the people who tortured her as a young girl, or has her fragile psyche finally snapped, resulting in the bloody demise of an innocent family? Later, when Lucie calls on her old friend Anna, the truth about Lucie’s traumatic early life experience slowly comes into focus.

Lucie (Jessie Pham), who has been missing for over a year, is found hysterical by the side of the road. She leads police to the derelict slaughterhouse where evidence suggests she was held captive. Although there is no evidence of sexual abuse, Lucie bears the signs of repeated injury and neglect. Traumatized and uncommunicative, Lucie is unable to tell the authorities anything further about her time in captivity or the people who kept her there. Over time, Lucie make friends with Anna (Erika Scott), another girl in the youth home where she lives. Anna looks after Lucie and eventually gains her trust. Lucie appears to be haunted by something or someone – a shadowy, rasping female figure (Isabelle Chasse) who apparently mutilates Lucie. After one such episode, Lucie makes Anna promise not to tell anyone about the creature haunting Lucie. Meanwhile, with the help of the doctor (Tony Robinow), the police even questions Anna, so as to know whether Lucie has communicated something to her. Anna says that Lucie cannot usually remember anything about her captivity period.

At this point, the film moves ahead fifteen years, and shifts its attention to the Belfond family. Mom (Patricia Tulasne) is fixing a sewer line in the yard, Dad (Robert Toupin) is making breakfast, and son Antoine (Xavier Dolan) and daughter Marie (Juliette Gosselin) are wrestling over a love note Antoine received. As everyone sits down to breakfast, the doorbell rings – it’s Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi), who shoots the father to death with a shotgun. The mother follows in short order, and then Lucie hesitates, asking Antoine how old he is and if he knew what his parents have done. When she doesn’t get an answer, she kills Antoine. Marie hides upstairs, but Lucie finds her and kills her as well. Panicked, Lucie calls Anna (Morjana Alaoui) at a public phone to come and help her. Lucie claims she has “done it”. Anna is shocked at hearing what Lucie says asks if she’s sure these are the people who kidnapped her. Lucie confirms and they complete their phone call. Lucie’s creature appears and tries to attack Lucie some more. Lucie explains that she’s “killed them”, and so the creature can leave her alone now. The creature continues to attack her. Lucie escapes the creature and runs out of the house and runs straight into Anna,
Lucie frightened tells Anna not to go into the house as “she’s” still in there. Anna says he has to and heads inside. She is horrified at the sight of what Lucie has done to the Belfond family. After nearly throwing up she starts working on moving the bodies. Lucie falls asleep in the daughter’s bedroom and wakes to strange noises in the house. She sees Anna burying the bodies outside. Anna returns inside to collect another body and takes a break in the room they have moved the bodies to. She then discovers the mother is still alive. The mother yells awaking Lucie again. Lucie heads downstairs to check on Anna. Anna attempts to hide the fact that the mother is still alive and takes the daughter’s body outside. She then hears Lucie screaming from inside as the creature resumes its assault. After escaping the creature again flashbacks reveal that it is a woman was being torture in the same building as Lucie.
Anna then attempts to smuggle the living mother out of the house. Lucie hears this as the mother screams in pain and escapes from the room Anna has locked her in. As Anna is getting the mother near to the exit Lucie arrives and beats the mother to death with a hammer. This is followed by one more attempt to placate the creature, as Lucie shows the creature that the mother is dead. The creature embraces her gently and begins to cut into her arms. Anna sees Lucie cutting herself – the creature is something Lucie is hallucinating. Lucie runs from the creature crashing through the glass entry way to the Belfond house. When Lucie was able to escape, she had an opportunity to take the woman with her but did not and has been haunted by it ever since. In a fit of rage and sadness, Lucie cuts her own throat. Anna brings Lucie’s body into the house, cleans it and wraps it in cloth. In cleaning up the house, she notices a hole in the wall behind a cabinet. Anna opens the cabinet and discovers a hidden staircase leading down. Anna discovers an underground complex decorated with pictures of people in extreme suffering. Exploring further, Anna discovers another woman, naked and chained to a wall with a metal blindfold riveted to her head. She frees the woman and takes her upstairs. Anna attempts to bathe the woman and she resists and after Anna removes the blindfold, the woman runs off, finds a knife and begins to mutilate herself, attempting to cut off her arm. As Anna tries to stop the woman, the woman is killed by a shotgun blast. A group of people have entered the house and they take Anna down into the hidden complex. An older woman – referred to only as “Mademoiselle” (Catherine Begin) – explains to Anna that they are not interested in victims, but martyrs – the act of martyrdom brings about transcendence and the possibility of seeing into the afterlife. They are, in essence, creating martyrs through systematic abuse in the hopes of learning what lies after death from their accounts as they achieve transcendence. They kidnap young women because young women seem to be especially likely to achieve a transcendent state. Anna is then rendered unconscious.
Anna wakes up chained to a chair similar to the one discovered in the building where Lucie was kept. She is fed some sort of unpleasant gruel and methodically beaten. This goes on for several days until a badly battered Anna loses the will to resist. She hears Lucie’s voice in her head, telling her that it is going to be okay, that she won’t suffer much longer. Anna is then brought to an operating theater, where she is strapped into a rotating rack and flayed. A now-skinless Anna is hung by a rack under hot lights. The people attending her remark on her considerable resilience, noting that she is still alive. The woman feeding Anna notices something about her has changed, and she calls Mademoiselle to tell her that Anna is close to transcendence. Mademoiselle hurries over and arrives in time for Anna to give her an account of the world beyond life and Mademoiselle was present to hear her account and would be sharing it with the assembled people shortly.
Mademoiselle appears to be getting ready as Etienne speaks to her through the door, asking if the announcement means that Anna saw something, and Mademoiselle says that she did, and it was clear and precise. Mademoiselle asks Etienne if he could imagine life after death. Etienne says he could not. Inside, Mademoiselle is sitting on the edge of a bathtub, where she takes a gun out of her purse. She calls to Etienne and tells him to continue doubting before shooting herself in the head. The movie ends with Anna, lying in some sort of medicated bath in the underground complex, looking at something very far away, fading to black and a definition of ‘martyr” which indicates the derivation from the Greek word for “witness.”