Martyrs Movie Review 140

 Martyrs is a  2008 French horror movie directed by Pascal Laugier and starring  Morjana Alaoui and Mylene Jampanoi.

The movie begins with a young girl running from an abandoned building and she is terrified and screaming. She seems to be injured. Then, we cut to a film of this girl in which it is shown that she was tortured and held captive by unknown persons. She is in an orphanage and she doesn't talk to anyone. A young girl, Anna tries to make friends with the withdrawn girl who is Lucie and they become friends. The police want Anna to help them to find Lucie's tormentors and Anna tries to get Lucie to talk, but she doesn't remember. Lucy has cuts all over her body and Anna thinks that she has done them herself, but there is some creature following her around and it is hurting Lucie. Cut to 15 years later and a normal family are together at the breakfast table. In comes a young woman and she shoots them all. It turns out that she is a grown up Lucie(Mylene Jampanoi). She thinks that the parents in the family were responsible for her capture and torture.

Lucie calls Anna(Morjana Alaoui) and tells her what she has done. Anna comes over to help Lucie clean up the mess.Meanwhile, Lucie is in the house and the creature is with her. It is running around and hurting Lucie every so often. Anna turns up and they get to work cleaning up the mess. It turns out that one of the family are still alive and Anna tries to help them escape but gets caught by Lucie.Lucy kills the survivor and they set about trying to bury them. Lucie is tormented by the creature again and this time, she slits her own throat and dies. Anna is horrified and devastated. She is looking around the house when she finds a secret tunnel. She decides to investigate and it is a torture chamber underneath the house. There is a woman being held captive there. Anna releases her and she tries to  help her, but in come a lot of people with guns. They kill the captive and take Anna. She meets a woman who is the boss of this organisation which tortures young women so that they can find out  about the afterlife. They think that if a young woman experiences enough pain, she will become a martyr and transcend this world and enter the next. These people want to know what happens then.

The woman called Mademoiselle tells Anna that Lucie escaped them 15 years ago. She tells her that the creature after Lucie didn't exist. It was a result of psychological damage caused by her capture and torture. Lucie was hurting herself. She gives the order for Anna to be taken down to a room where she is chained up and tortured and beaten every day. She eventually goes crazy and begins to break down.She begins hallucinating and she thinks about Lucy and even talks to her. People look at her and she is skinned alive. Somehow, she survives this and she tells Mademoiselle what she has discovered as she has become a true martyr. She whispers it in her ear. 

The final scene is where a group of people have come to see Anna and they are gathered together at the request of Mademoiselle. She shoots herself so that nobody can know what Anna told her and that is the end of the movie. This movie was good. I liked it. It was interesting and there are some brutal scenes. All in all, I will give it a 7/10.