The movie starts with Lucie Jurin, escapes from a disused slaughterhouse where she's been imprisoned and tortured for more than a year. The perpetrators and their motivations remain a mystery. Lucie is placed in an orphanage, where she's befriended by a young girl named Anna Assaoui, who quickly discovers that Lucie believes that she's constantly being terrorized by a ghoulish creature—a disfigured, emaciated woman. Even so, Anna comforts Lucie every time she has a nightmare.
Fifteen years later, Lucie bursts into the home of an apparently normal family, the Belfonds - Gabrielle, her husband, and their children Antoine and Marie - and kills them all with a shotgun. Elsewhere, Anna waits for Lucie. Although Anna knows that Lucie believes the Belfonds are the people responsible for her childhood abuse, she's horrified when Lucie tells her that she's killed them. Upon arriving at the house, Anna discovers that Gabrielle is still alive and tries to help her escape, but Lucie bludgeons Gabrielle to death. Lucie is again attacked by the scarred creature, but Anna sees only Lucie hurting herself; the 'creature' is nothing more than a psychological manifestation of Lucie's guilt for leaving behind another girl who was also tortured with her as a child. Lucie, realizing that her insanity will never leave her, commits suicide.
The next day, Anna, still at the family's house, telephones her mother, from whom she has been estranged; their conversation implies that Anna suffered abuse from her parents as a child. Suddenly, Anna hears some noises and discovers a secret underground chamber in the living room. Imprisoned within is a horribly tortured young woman named Sarah, proving that Lucie was right about the family. Anna helps Sarah escape, but soon after Anna mourns the loss of Lucie, Sarah is seen mutilating her arm with a knife, which Anna has difficulty preventing. Insane and physically brutalized, Sarah is shot in the head by a group who unexpectedly arrives. Captured, Anna meets their leader, an elderly lady referred to as Mademoiselle, who explains that she belongs to a secret philosophical society seeking to discover the secrets of the afterlife through the creation of "martyrs". Their experiments inflict systematic acts of torture upon young women in the belief that their suffering will result in a transcendental insight into the world beyond this one. Mademoiselle also believes that the world is divided into victims (people who can't tolerate tortures and fall into madness, like Lucie and Sarah) and martyrs (people who "accept" tortures and transcend).
Anna becomes the group's latest subject. After a period of being brutally beaten and degraded, she hallucinates a conversation with Lucie and is later told that she's progressed further than any other test subject and has reached the "final stage." She's flayed alive and survives the procedure, entering a state that is "euphoric" and likened to achieving transcendence. Mademoiselle arrives eagerly and Anna whispers into her ear.
Members of the society gather at the house to learn of the insights Anna shared with Mademoiselle. As Mademoiselle and her assistant wait for the others to arrive, he asks Mademoiselle if what Anna said to her was clear. Mademoiselle replies yes, and asks him in turn if he can imagine what comes after death. When he says no, Mademoiselle instructs him to "keep doubting," then abruptly produces a handgun and kills herself with it.
Conclusion:
Movie is good, but feels like kind of empty somewhere, like the main plot begins with Anna, I feel it should have been a bit more elaborated, but overall it's a good and unique movie with horrifying and thrilling experience.
Please suggest any movie you want us to watch and review.
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