[yasr_overall_rating]
A woman and her childhood friend seek out revenge on those who victimized and abused them.
As “Martyrs” opens, we see Lucie, a young girl, frantically running away from someone, or some thing, screaming for help. Obviously traumatized, we are never told what happened to her and eventually, she is sent to an all-girls school where she is befriended by Anna, and as the two girls grow up together, they become inseparable. As an extraordinary friendship forms between them, Lucie finally tells her what happened, that she had been kidnapped and held prisoner in the basement of somebody’s house, where she was sexually and physically assaulted.
Ten years later, Lucie (Troian Bellisario) appears on the doorstep of a seemingly normal family, out in the country; a father and mother and two teenage kids. Hearing a knock, the father opens the front door and Lucie blows him away with a double-barreled shotgun. She makes her way inside the house where she proceeds to kill the remainder of the family, one by one. Afterwards, she calls Anna (Bailey Noble), crying, and asks her to come and get her. When Anna arrives, she is beyond shocked at the bloodbath in front of her.
When Lucie claims that this was the family that held her hostage when she was young, Anna believes that she has finally lost her mind, a result of the traumatic events that transpired in her childhood. She tells Lucie to rest while she attempts to clean up the bloody mess and while she is in the laundry room, she discovers a hidden door in the back that leads to a secret passageway. Upon further investigation, she comes across a set of keys hanging on a ladder that ascends into a dark basement and against her better judgment, she goes down. There, she uncovers several locked rooms with young, frightened girls inside. Using the keys, she unlocks one of the girls and tells the others that she will come back for them and as she makes her way back up to the house, meeting Lucie, they are overpowered by a group of men who end up taking them back down into the basement.
Now tied up herself, Anna is greeted by Eleanor (Kate Burton), who introduces herself as the leader of the group. They believe that if a woman is tortured and her skin literally ripped from her body, just as she is on the verge of death, it would be conceivable for her to attain a higher plane of consciousness, therefore allowing her to see the afterlife and what is to come, making it possible for her to convey this knowledge to the group. While Lucie was a young girl, she passed the initial test, making her the ideal candidate but then she somehow managed to escape. When an exam proves that Anna is not strong enough to survive the initial dissection, she is knocked unconscious, taken outside, and buried in a shallow grave. Naturally, she survives and knowing that Lucie will be killed if she doesn’t act fast, Anna regains her strength and strategizes what could be her very last plan of attack.
While the first half of the movie is grounded very much in realism, the latter half falls into stereotypical “Saw” territory. People are tortured while others watch on, and aside from Lucie and Anna, nobody else cares one little bit, about the value of human life. Troian Bellisario as Lucie, gives a remarkable and heartbreaking performance as a young woman who has never known the smallest semblance of normalcy throughout her short life. Bailey Noble as her afflicted yet compassionate best friend Anna, is just as impressive, as she starts out very cynical and doubtful of Lucie’s supposed far-fetched tale, only to realize that there really are monsters in the world.
While the story admittedly strives to go deeper than most other horror films of its ilk, unfortunately, it doesn’t realize those goals. I would have much preferred the movie be a straight-up revenge flick, with Lucie out for blood for the atrocities she incurred as a child, and while this is most assuredly the case for the first half of the film, the latter half descends into the absurdity of secret cults with preposterous notions and ideas that will transcend all others. The movie does not shy away from the violence it depicts but sadly, it does shy away from the fact that this could have been an exceptionally well-made thriller, without all of the unnecessary and, quite frankly, unproductive exposition that bogs it down.
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