Martyrs Lane, 2021.
Directed by Ruth Platt.
Starring Kiera Thompson, Denise Gough, Sienna Sayer, Steven Cree, and Hannah Rae.
SYNOPSIS:
10-year-old Leah gets nightly visits from a creepy young girl whom only Leah can see and who may or may not hold the key to Leah’s difficult relationship with her distant mother.
Guilt can do strange things to people, especially when children are involved, and the damage it can do to families is tragic, but what can be more damaging than guilty admissions are guilty secrets, often magnified when seen through the eyes of a child. Martyrs Lane is a movie that takes on that burden of seeing an adult’s trauma through the filter of a 10-year-old girl’s perspective, and whilst an unsettling premise, is it really a horror movie?
Well, not really but it does have a few creepy moments. Said 10-year-old girl is Leah (Kiera Thompson) who suffers from nightmares, normally involving her mother Sarah (Denise Gough). Sarah is a little distant with Leah, not in a nasty way but she doesn’t seem quite so resentful towards her teenage daughter Bex (Hannah Rae), and Leah seems to have a more loving relationship with her priest father Thomas (Steven Cree), seemingly taking on his sense of moral duty towards others and his Christian values.
Because of this sometimes-strained family setting and her mother’s odd behaviour when it comes to certain items of clothing, jewellery or even gifts from other women in her social circle, Leah believes that there is something missing, like she isn’t being told a big family secret, and during the night she starts to get visited by Rachel (Sienna Sayer), a little girl of a similar age who seems to know things, such as where certain ‘lost’ items are. As time goes on and the two girls share information with each other via a truth-or-lie-type game, Leah begins to piece together what secret her family seem to be keeping from her.
And it doesn’t really take a genius to figure it out once the ghostly figure of Rachel appears and lets Leah know where the mysterious lock of hair she stole from her mother’s locket is. This is approximately halfway through the movie, which means there is still about 45 minutes to go until the big reveal so Leah can finally find out why her mother is so aloof with her, and about 10 minutes of that is exposition and a few supernatural effects to justify the ‘horror’ element that the story promises, which does make the previous 80-odd minutes a bit of a slog when you’ve already worked out what has gone on and why.
Less of a horror movie and more of a drama – the sort you used to find in the darkest of kid’s TV shows in the 1970s/’80s – Martyrs Lane is clearly aiming for the sort of chills that Peter Medak’s The Changeling or Bernard Rose’s Paperhouse gave audiences, and whilst there are some strong elements here – such as the performances of the two child actors, who are both excellent – there are other areas where it just doesn’t deliver enough. Leah’s relationship with her father is a sweet one, and whilst Thomas is portrayed as absent a lot of the time due to his parishioners needing his help, he doesn’t really have a lot to do in the overall scheme of things. The scenes where he talks to Leah and tries to explain things to her in an adult way are some of the best in the whole movie but there aren’t nearly enough of them, and at the end of the movie he may as well not be there at all for all in the involvement he has, when he should at least play a part in the climax in some capacity.
There are other instances where the writing goes too far in one direction but not others, making the overall story uneven and, ultimately, not as satisfying as it should have been. That isn’t to say that Martyrs Lane is a bad movie, because it isn’t, but the plodding pace (calling it a slow-burn would indicate it has a scorching ending to justify the wait, which it doesn’t) and predictable plot could have worked better if there had been some more intricate details to add some more intrigue and grab your attention –there is obviously a religious angle that could have been explored, but it plays no other part other than to tell us that Thomas is a good person and so is his daughter – but overall, Martyrs Lane is atmospheric and occasionally spooky, but too slow and formulaic to offer up anything other than a few strong performances and comparisons to movies that do grief and a child’s perception of adults being terrifying better and with more edge.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Chris Ward
