[Review] Martyrs Lane

Shudder original Martyrs Lane premieres on Shudder September 9th.

God’s love is like sunlight. It seeks out every dark place, every shadow.
What if you hide?

Every family has its secrets, but the keeping often takes its toll on those it’s meant to shield. Ruth Platt’s Martyrs Lane is a fairy tale whispered in the dark, shadowy and half-heard. 

This melancholy fable takes place in a remote English vicarage perched on the edge of the woods. Children are more perceptive than we give them credit for, and Martyrs Lane explores the pall that unacknowledged grief can cast over our childhoods. The film centers on ten year-old Leah (Kiera Thompson), the youngest daughter of a well-intentioned but busy country vicar (Steven Cree), on the eve of her Confirmation. Leah is a thoughtful, lonely child who tries in earnest to embody the rigid ideals espoused by her religious community. No matter how hard she tries, however, she can’t seem to earn her distant mother’s love. Her much older sister Bex (Hannah Rae) is of little help, deliberately terrorizing Leah with ghost stories and mocking her devotion to her faith. 

It’s clear from the outset that something isn’t quite right in the family home that also serves as a community center.  By day the sunny kitchen bustles with activity, woebegone parishioners popping by unannounced for a sympathetic ear. Despite the trappings of hominess, warm tea and cake slices do little to dampen the emotional chill that blankets the house by night, when the walls murmur secrets just out of earshot.  When a vision of a child in white (Sienna Sayer) appears in a sun-drenched forest hollow, Leah is all too ready to embrace the apparition with open arms. Little does she know that her new friend harbors a sinister secret, a revelation poised to bring the family’s brittle veneer of closeness tumbling down. 

Martyrs Lane’s greatest strength is its atmosphere. A largely muted backdrop of blues and whites draws attention to the religious iconography that lurks around every corner in varying shades of unease. A damp clump of blonde hair is concealed beneath a figure of the Virgin Mary on a hardwood nightstand. Leah’s gaze lingers on a rumpled flyer on the rectory’s pantry door, emblazoned with cartoon angels and stars: 

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,

for by doing so, some people have shown hospitality to angels, without knowing it. 

Hebrews 13:2 

Denial and obfuscation suffuse the film’s cinematography. As is typical of anyone avoiding difficult truths, Leah’s gaze rarely focuses on what’s directly in front of her. She frequently stares at the ground, ignoring the rows of weathered tombstones that line her path, or up towards the ceiling, where ethereal visions begin to form in her head. 

Deprived of meaningful contact with her mother (Denise Gough), Leah takes to snooping, peering around door frames and drinking in whatever glimpses of her mother Sarah that she can. Mirrors are a recurring motif in the film, highlighting the family’s unwillingness to be honest with each other and themselves. In keeping with the theme of religious iconography, Leah often catches glimpses of her mother through rounded mirrors, creating a halo effect. It’s clear that Leah yearns for meaningful connection, for answers, but the price of transparency is unbearably high. 

The effectiveness of the film also owes a huge debt to the captivating performances of young actresses Kiera Thompson and Sienna Sayer. Some of the best scenes are filmed from a child’s perspective, the camera low to the ground. We can’t help but feel towered over, dwarfed by adults in an environment we are powerless to change. The atmosphere is charged with dread as Leah wakes from a nightmare to pad down the hallway into the yawning darkness, flinching at every creak of the floorboards. 

As a film fueled by the weight of omission, Martyrs Lane ultimately falls short in its more explicit final act. The ending’s overt, granular reveal and reliance on flashy effects ultimately detract from the emotional nuance that made most of the film so powerful. However, many of my favorite horror flicks have derailed a bit towards the end, and I understand that the perfect ending is difficult to land.

While this ghost story is generally more plaintive than downright scary, it does pull its jump-scare weight with periodically jarring sound design. Overall, I’d recommend this film to anyone who enjoys a gentler touch to supernatural religious horror. Platt offers a compelling glimpse at what might happen when you don’t practice what you preach with the ones you love most.