Macabre…ish Horror Review: Martyrs

Martyrs, 2015/ 1 hr 26 min

A traumatized girl, Lucie (Ever Prishkulnick), escapes from a nightmare and is placed in an orphanage. The police are looking for answers but she only talks to one girl at the school, Anna (Elyse Cole). She’s scared of monsters and is afraid of the dark, every night she has night terrors.

Ten years later, a family is having breakfast and a girl enters with a shot gun and kills them, of the son she asks,” Do you know what your parents did?” And when it’s all over she collapses and cries. Later she calls Anna and says she found them. Anna (Bailey Noble) is freaked out when she realizes the family has been slaughtered and leaves. But someone or something is still in the house…

Anna returns and Lucie (Troian Bellisario) tells a story of atrocities and a monster (Sara Zanelletti) that somehow connects her to them. She explains that they have to clean up and leave the house like it never happened. But Anna just wants to call the cops.

Lucie is also having horrible flashbacks and killing these people didn’t stop any of it, like she thought it would.

As Anne cleans up she begins to find clues. One is a hidden room in the pantry. In the room is a locked hatch in the floor and a ladder. Inside is a bunker with cells, all locked but one, The wall lined with grotesque photos and in the unlocked cell is a little girl, Sam (Caitlin Carmichael) cuffed and chained with only a chair in the room.

Upon attempting to escape, some men and the next morning, a woman, arrive at the house and everything gets much worse. And enter the nightmarish world of people who are looking for some kind of proof of transcendence and the answer to what comes after death, through torture.

This is the American remake of the 2008 French film, which os much more violent, of the same name. It is sad and violent, sometimes gory and there are a few jump scares. It was sadder than expected and I will probably never watch it again but not because of production value which was good.