Martyrs

Years ago, a young girl named Lucie escaped from a derelict industrial site where she had been confined and tortured for an unknown stretch of time. She was found wandering an empty road in soiled clothes, traumatized and silent, and placed in a Catholic orphanage. There she met Anna, an older girl who became her best friend and protector. Lucie was haunted from then on by a malnourished female apparition — a wraith that scratched and bit her without anyone else seeing it.

Fifteen years later, Lucie believes she has identified the family responsible for her abduction: a normal-looking suburban couple eating breakfast with their two teenage children. She knocks on their door and slaughters all four of them with a shotgun. Anna arrives at the house in response to Lucie's call. She is horrified, skeptical that Lucie has found the right family, and tries to clean up. The wraith returns and attacks Lucie — it is the manifestation of another girl tortured alongside her whom Lucie left behind and could not save. Lucie cuts her own throat in the yard with a straight razor.

Anna stays in the house alone to bury the bodies. She finds a hidden door in the cellar that opens onto a sub-basement. Inside is another captive: a young woman starved, beaten, with a metal restraint bolted to her skull. Anna frees her and tries to help her escape.

A group of well-dressed men and women arrive at the house. They are the Society — an organization that has been kidnapping and torturing young women for years in an attempt to create 'martyrs,' subjects who, pushed past every limit, will glimpse what lies beyond death. The family was their local cell. Their elderly leader, Mademoiselle, addresses Anna calmly: she has been selected as the next subject because of her empathy and emotional resilience.

Anna is chained in the basement chamber. Weeks of systematic beating, deprivation, and confinement begin. Eventually she stops resisting and enters a transcendent stillness. The final stage: the Society skins her alive, leaving her flayed but conscious and suspended in the chamber. Her eyes remain open and witnessing.

Mademoiselle visits Anna alone and asks her what she has seen on the other side. Anna whispers something into her ear. Mademoiselle assembles the inner circle and prepares to deliver Anna's testimony. Moments before, she retreats to a bathroom and shoots herself in the mouth. When an associate asks what the martyr told her, Mademoiselle replies only with a final cryptic question and pulls the trigger. The film ends on her death, leaving deliberately unspecified whether what Anna saw was horrifying or transfigurative.