Martyrs (2008) Hey what's up guys.
Today I'll show you a horror drama film: "Martyrs"!
Spoilers ahead, watch out and take care! The film begins with a little girl with
bruises all over her body, running out from a disused slaughterhouse,
where she has been imprisoned and tortured. The poor young girl named Lucie,
manages to call for help, and the police soon raid the building to imprison her captors.
As they wander the derelict slaughterhouse, police find concrete evidence that Lucie was
once indeed held captive. From this, they're certain that Lucie bears the sign of repeated
injury and neglect. Traumatized, Lucie has become uncommunicative, causing her to be unable to
tell the authorities further information about her captivity or her captors.
The authorities hand Lucie to a youth home, where another girl called Anna, befriends her.
Of course, Lucie pushes her away; but Anna eventually gains Lucie's trust over time.
The authorities question Anna instead of Lucie, because of their bond and friendship.
Anna informs them that Lucie has never talked, or mentioned anything about her captivity or captors;
but there's something else. The questioning gets interrupted, when one of the nurses
informs them that Lucie failed to show up at lunch. Anna immediately heads to their room,
and finds Lucie shivering in fear, and covered with wounds on her arm in the bathroom.
Lucie sheds tears as she begs Anna not to tell anyone. she tells Anna that she didn't hurt
herself. Anna believes her words. Later that night, Lucie blocks their door with a chair
before going to sleep. However, when a bad dream wakes her up, Lucie finds the door wide open.
Lucie weeps in fear as she sees this, so she calls for Anna, who remains heavily asleep. Lucie then
checks the hallway when she feels someone passing behind her, prompting her to run back to the bed,
and hide under the blanket. Suddenly, a shadowy-rasping-female figure sits on her bed,
and snarls at her before attacking Lucie. Fast-forward to 15 years later after that. The
Belfond family has woken up, and the four members gather around the dining table for breakfast.
The atmosphere quickly turns heated, as the mother compares her children.
The doorbell rings shortly after; and when the father opens the door, a now grown-up Lucie
shoots him to death with her shotgun. Lucie shoots the mother next, before reloading her weapon.
As she does so, the daughter runs upstairs while the son remains in the kitchen.
Lucie holds him at gunpoint, as she hesitates to kill them. She asks him if he's aware of
what their parents have done. but when she receives no answer, Lucie shoots him too.
After that, Lucie goes upstairs to the daughter's room, where she ends the daughter's life with
two shotgun bullets. Uncertain what to do next, Lucie contacts Anna on a public phone,
and informs her that she has found the people who kidnapped her; and she had punished them.
Lucie is certain these people cause the trauma that still haunts her; so Anna takes
the Belfonds' home address. While waiting for Anna, the shadowy-rasping-female figure appears,
and attempts to cause more harm to Lucie. Although scared, Lucie explains that she has
killed the people who imprisoned and tortured her, so the creature can leave her now.
However, the creature keeps attacking her, so Lucie has no choice but to run out of the
house to save her life. she runs straight into Anna. Still frightened, shaken, and wounded,
Lucie tells Anna the creature is in the house. Anna leaves Lucie outside, and enters the home
to check if the creature is indeed there. Anna gets horrified by the grisly scene before
her, causing her to break down, and almost puke herself from disgust. She locks herself in the
bathroom, calming herself down, as she hears Lucie returning to the house. After a while,
Anna takes the first aid kit from the trunk, and starts patching up Lucie's new wounds on the back.
After that, Anna helps Lucie move the bodies to the bathroom; and after doing so,
Lucie takes a break in the daughter's room. Not long after, Lucie wakes up to strange noises
in the house. when she checks it out, she sees Anna burying the bodies outside in the rain.
Lucie returns to sleeping, while Anna goes back to the bathroom to drag another body outside.
However, Anna discovers that the mother is still alive. The mother yells and groans,
awakening Lucie again. Upon hearing Lucie calling out to her,
Anna immediately tells the mother to be quiet. After that, Anna drags the daughter's body out
of the room, making Lucie return upstairs. As Anna prepares the daughter's body for burying,
she hears the sound of glass shattering, and Lucie screaming. Anna quickly returns inside,
as the creature resumes its assault on Lucie. Anna helps Lucie escape the creature.
A flashback reveals that the creature is actually one of the women held captive in the same disused
slaughterhouse, that she escaped from when Lucie was young. The young Lucie encounters the woman
on her way out, and the woman pleads with her eyes for help, as her tongue has been cut off. However,
young Lucie has no choice but to leave without her, before their kidnappers catch her.
The flashback ends and resumes to the present time. Lucie wakes up, and realizes that Anna has
locked her in the room. At that same time, Anna attempts to help the mother escape the house.
Lucie hears the mother's groans of pain, and realizes what's happening;
so she escapes through the windows. As Anna and the mother are near the exit,
Lucie suddenly appears and beats the mother to death with a hammer. Anna repeatedly tries to stop
her; but Lucie keeps bludgeoning. when she's done with the mother, Lucie moves on to Anna. She's
enraged and hurt that Anna tried to save one of the people that tortured her. Lucie realizes that
Anna never believed her, not even once. Suddenly, Lucie hears the creature's heavy
breathing behind her; but instead of running away, Lucie shows the creature that she has
killed their murderers. The creature embraces her gently; but then the creature begins cutting into
Lucie's arms. Anna immediately goes to her after hearing Lucie's screams. But all Anna can see is
Lucie inflicting her own arms on herself. This reveals that there was never a creature. It was
all Lucie hurting herself, and hallucinating that it was the woman she left in the slaughterhouse,
doing all of it to her. In fact, It's her guilt and trauma that still haunt her.
Lucie escapes the woman by crashing through the glass entryway; and in a fit of rage and sadness,
Lucie slits her own throat in front of Anna. The cut is not too deep, so Anna immediately
takes Lucie inside, and cleans the wound while wrapping it in a cloth to stop the bleeding.
Lucie remains unconscious till the morning. while Anna is talking to her biological mother, she
hears loud noises. She leaves the phone to check it out. She then finds a hole in the wall behind
a cabinet. Anna opens the cabinet, and discovers a hidden staircase leading downstairs.
Anna takes a flashlight with her as she goes down, where she discovers an underground complex,
decorated with photographs of people, mostly women, in extreme suffering. As she explores
further, Anna finds a woman naked and chained to a wall, with a metal blindfold riveted to her head.
Although still shocked, Anna frees the poor woman full of cuts on her body,
and takes her upstairs. With the light, Anna can see that the woman is malnourished.
Anna puts the woman in the bathtub, where she removes the metal blindfold. After doing so,
Anna leaves the woman alone, so she can rest. Anna checks in on Lucie, who has gotten pale.
Soon after, Anna realizes that Lucie is already dead. Anna breaks down into tears,
as she apologizes to Lucie for not believing everything she has shared.
Anna wakes up not long after, hearing the woman's pained moans. so she follows the sound,
and finds her in a room with a knife, attempting to cut off her arm. when Anna tries to stop her
from mutilating herself, the woman runs off. But then, the woman falls dead on the cold ground,
with a shotgun wound on her head, and a group of people come in.
The men remove the bodies from the house, while the other two take Anna downstairs to
the underground complex and cuff her, leaving her in the hallway. This mysterious group of
people buries the Belfond family, together with the woman and Lucie's bodies.
Not long after, an old lady comes down the underground complex,
and explains that Lucie is just one of the many victims of suffering. However, they are not
interested in these victims, but in finding the martyrs, which she claims are rare.
The old lady explains to Anna that these martyrs are rare, because they can survive any kind of
suffering, and carry all the world's sins. It is their suffering that makes them transcend
and see the afterlife. The old lady shows photographs of dead women in extreme
suffering throughout time, who she claims are alive despite their physical state,
because they have seen life after death. Their eyes tell her that they are still alive,
and people like The old lady, in essence, are creating martyrs. The research group are trying
to achieve this through systematic abuse, in the hopes of learning what lies after death, as these
martyrs transcend. The group kidnap and torture young women like Lucie, who are more likely to
achieve a transcendent state, because of their strong will to live. After that, The old lady
leaves, and her men render Anna unconscious. Anna wakes up chained to a chair, similar to
the one discovered in the building where Lucie was kept. Anna tries her best to free herself;
but all that can be heard is her screaming, and the sound of chains clanging. Hours later, one of
The old lady's men comes into her cell, and forces her to eat some sort of unpleasant gruel, before
beating her methodically as per their plan. These people torture Anna in more ways than one
every day, until she loses the will to resist and live. Until one day, Anna begins hearing Lucie's
voice in her head, telling her that she's going to be okay, and will suffer no more.
After days of suffering the torture physically and mentally, Anna is brought to an operating theater,
where they strap her to a rotating rack. As the doctor skins her alive, Anna cannot
scream from too much pain. After that brutal torturing, the doctor hangs a now skinless Anna
by a rack under hot lights. Moments later, the woman feeding Anna calls The old lady in panic,
and informs her that Anna's eyes have changed, and she may be close to transcendence. The old
lady hurries over, and arrives in time for Anna to give her an account of what she has witnessed.
The following day, many wealthy people arrive at the house, where The old lady's
assistant announces the big news. Anna is one of the four people that achieved martyrdom in
their 70 years of research. Among these four young women, Anna is the first to provide an
account of the world beyond life; and The old lady will share it with them in a moment.
After that, the assistant leaves the assembly, and talks to the old lady through the door, asking her
if the announcement means that Anna saw something. she replies that Anna indeed saw something, and it
was clear and precise. The old lady then asks her assistant if he could imagine life after death;
and he responds that he could not. Inside, The old lady sits on the bathtub's edge,
where she pulls her gun out of her purse, and tells her assistant to keep doubting,
before shooting herself in the mouth. The old lady chooses to kill herself, possibly
because she finally gets to know and becomes desperate and terrified by the life after death.
The scene blacks out, and displays a definition of "martyr," which indicates the derivation from
the Greek word "witness," and implies that knowing the truth is a fatal sin,
especially for the old lady who keeps torturing people to learn the truth in the afterlife.
The film ends with Anna lying in some sort of medicated bath in the underground complex,
looking at something very far away, presumably seeing life after death!
This's Daniel CC Movie Channel! Stay safe and enjoy your day!