Ruth Platt’s Martyrs Lane is the kind of ghost story that sneaks up on you quietly, like a child in white standing at your bedside at 3 a.m. asking if you “want to play.” Only this time, she’s less interested in jump scares and more into excavating your unresolved trauma. It’s a slow-burn British gothic horror set in a vicarage, which is already cheating—the moment you set a movie in a creaky clergy house, the atmosphere basically generates itself. Fortunately, Platt doesn’t coast on vibes alone. She delivers something more unnerving: a horror film that’s actually about grief, guilt, and the way adults emotionally abandon their children while still packing lunch for them.
Leah, the World’s Smallest Ghost Hunter
At the center is Leah, played by Kiera Thompson, a 10-year-old wandering around a cavernous vicarage like she’s in a spiritual escape room no one invited her to. Leah’s life feels like an endless, dimly lit Wednesday. Her mother is emotionally frostbitten, her father is busy doing vicar things and being gently useless, and the house is soaked in a grief that nobody will name. So when a mysterious nocturnal visitor starts appearing at her window and offering cryptic knowledge, Leah does what any horror-movie child would do: she lets the possibly dead kid in. The relationship that unfolds is tender, eerie, and weirdly adorable—like a sleepover hosted by grief itself.
The Vicarage: Pinterest Gothic with Trauma
The vicarage setting is a triumph of visual storytelling. This isn’t a loud, showy haunted house with walls bleeding and furniture flying around like it’s on a Disney ride. Instead, Martyrs Lane gives us the kind of lived-in, slightly shabby English home where the wallpaper looks like it remembers better days and the hallways are long enough for a small child to get existential halfway down. Shadows gather in corners, doors linger slightly ajar, and the nighttime quiet is so deep you start to feel sorry for it. Production design leans into realism, which makes the ghostly elements feel less like “special effects” and more like the house finally coughing up the secrets it’s been choking on for years.
Denise Gough: Queen of Repressed Horror
Denise Gough’s Sarah is the film’s emotional landmine. She doesn’t play a “cold mother”; she plays a woman so hollowed out by loss and guilt that warmth feels like a luxury item she can’t afford. Her distance from Leah isn’t cartoonishly cruel; it’s painfully human. You can almost see the effort it takes for her to be functional and not simply evaporate into her own sadness. Every time Sarah snaps, withdraws, or lingers too long on some invisible memory, Gough makes it feel horribly understandable. It’s a horror performance built from micro-expressions instead of screaming—and arguably more chilling than any jump scare. She’s not possessed; she’s just devastated, which for a kid might as well be the same thing.
Steven Cree’s Vicar: Emotionally Present-ish
Steven Cree’s Thomas, the vicar and Leah’s father, exists in that familiar cinematic zone of “nice but emotionally underqualified.” He’s kind, clearly cares, but there’s an unspoken sense that his faith and his role give him pre-packaged phrases instead of actual tools. He’s the sort of dad who’ll tell you “everything happens for a reason” while standing in the rubble of your emotional life. Cree doesn’t overplay him; he lets the character’s helplessness speak for itself. Thomas is not a villain, but his inability to confront what’s actually haunting the house—the grief, not the ghost—makes him part of Leah’s quiet horror. The film smartly shows that being a spiritual leader doesn’t mean you’re not a complete amateur at dealing with your own family’s pain.
Kiera Thompson: Tiny Protagonist, Massive Burden
Kiera Thompson carries the film on her very small shoulders, and somehow they don’t buckle. Leah is curious, lonely, and heartbreakingly aware that something is wrong, even if nobody will tell her what. Thompson’s performance avoids the annoying precociousness that often infects child-centered horror. Leah isn’t a snark machine or a wise sage in pigtails—she’s an actual kid, trying to decode the world with the limited tools she has. Watching her follow the nightly clues given by her ghostly visitor feels less like a puzzle game and more like watching a child forced to do emotional archeology on behalf of the adults around her. If you don’t want to wrap her in a blanket and smuggle her out of that house, check your humanity for signs of haunting.
The Ghost Friend from Your Worst Childhood Dream
Leah’s nightly visitor—played with unnerving charm by Hannah Rae—embodies that perfect horror contradiction: sweet and terrifying at the same time. She shows up like a bedtime companion and gradually morphs into an emissary of truth, peeling back layers of the family’s reality with each visit. The film resists making her a simple malevolent force; she’s more like a manifestation of unresolved sorrow with a child’s sense of play. Their “games” and tasks are laced with creeping dread, but also a weird intimacy. It’s as if grief decided the best way to relay its message was via a spectral pen pal. The horror here is psychological, not just supernatural: what’s more terrifying than realizing your imaginary friend has a better grasp of your family history than you do?
Ruth Platt’s Direction: Slow Burn, High Yield
Ruth Platt directs with a patience that will infuriate adrenaline junkies and absolutely reward everyone else. Martyrs Laneis not interested in throwing a loud scare every five minutes; it wants to live in your head rent-free afterward. The pacing is deliberate, the scares are carefully rationed, and the tension builds through atmosphere, performance, and the creeping sense that Leah is walking toward an emotional guillotine. Platt trusts the audience to pick up on visual and emotional cues rather than spoon-feeding exposition. The result feels less like a formula horror flick and more like a ghost story told in hushed tones after midnight, the kind that leaves you staring at the dark corner of your room wondering what your family never told you.
A Horror Film About Grief That Still Likes You
For all its somber themes, Martyrs Lane never feels like punishment. The dark humor isn’t in punchlines; it’s in the absurdity of adults trying—and failing—to keep secrets in a house where the walls have better memories than they do. There’s a quietly ironic streak in the way faith, denial, and haunting intersect. You have a vicar who can talk about salvation but can’t talk to his daughter, a mother who can keep the house running but can’t keep her grief from leaking into every room, and a child who makes friends with a ghost because, frankly, the ghost is the only one leveling with her. It’s morbidly funny in that “if you don’t laugh, you’ll scream” kind of way.
Final Verdict: Haunting, Human, and Worth the Nightmares
Martyrs Lane is a rare thing: a gothic horror film that respects your intelligence, your emotions, and your childhood fears all at once. It doesn’t rely on cheap theatrics, and it doesn’t treat grief like a gimmick. Instead, it builds a story where the supernatural and the psychological intertwine so tightly you’re not sure which is worse. Anchored by strong performances from Denise Gough, Steven Cree, and especially Kiera Thompson, and guided by Ruth Platt’s assured, quietly merciless direction, the film earns its chills honestly. You might come for the ghost, but you’ll stay for the gut punch when you realize what she represents. And if, after watching, you start side-eyeing the creaks in your own house at night—well, that’s just the film reminding you that some hauntings begin at home.
