Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ruth Platt
Starring: Denise Gough, Steven Cree, Kiera Thompson, Sienna Sayer
Director Ruth Platt's Martyrs Lane belongs to the
tradition of films like Spirit of the Beehive, Pan's Labyrinth and
A Monster Calls
(all of which are curiously Spanish to a large degree). It's another movie
in which a child is helped to negotiate a traumatic period by an entity that
may or may not have their best interests at heart. By dealing with adult
themes like grief and parental neglect through the eyes of a child
protagonist, it also recalls the sort of children's TV shows that would
regularly play on British TV from the late 1960s to early '90s, an age when
exposing children to the potential horrors of life was considered a
necessary part of their upbringing and preparation for adulthood.
Our young protagonist here is Leah (Kiera Thompson, who could be
mistaken for the kid sister of English actress Jessica Barden), a
10-year-old who lives with her chirpy vicar father Thomas (Steven Cree), her grieving, inattentive mother Sarah (Denise Gough) and her
bitchy sister Bex (Hannah Rae).
At a loose end over the summer months, Leah begins exploring the grounds of
her family's vicarage and uncovers curious bric a brac that seems to have
been left for her to find. In the sort of cruel act that children commit for
no explainable reason, she steals her mother's precious locket, losing the
coil of blonde hair kept within. The reasons for Sarah's grief are never
spelled out, until the ending, when they're literally spelled out, but you
don't need to be a genius to figure out the source of her grief. I'm not
sure why the movie is so coy about such an obvious detail.
If the penny doesn't drop early in this regard, it certainly will when Leah
stumbles across Rachel (Sienna Sayer), a young girl decked in angel
wings who has clearly died a tragic death. That doesn't bother Leah, who
befriends Rachel, gradually learning the truth of their connection.
It's easy to see what Platt is trying to do here. It's a sort of reverse
A Monster Calls in that here it's not a child being prepared
for loss but a child holding the key to a parent moving on from loss. It
never quite gels though, chiefly because of its handling of Rachel. Nothing
about the resurrected child suggests she has any malevolent intentions
towards Leah, which makes the climactic turn into full-on horror come out of
nowhere.
I can't help think that Martyrs Lane may have functioned
better as a straight drama with magic realist elements rather than an
outright fantasy piece. The film is arguably at its weakest in the scenes
involving the spirit of Rachel, and strongest when we're simply spending
time with Leah as she uncovers clues to her mother's psychological state.
The young Thompson is a real find and her performance keeps the film
anchored as its narrative gets increasingly messy and clouded. Her
performance is so strong that it renders the film's fantasy elements
superfluous as her eyes and reactions carry the story on their own.
