This piece contains assorted spoilers.
I
Following the opening titles of Pascal Laugier’s staggeringly bleak 2008 horror film Martyrs, we cut to a wide shot of a large, modern house, somewhere out in the countryside judging by the sounds of wind and birds. The calm is interrupted by a scream, revealed in the next shot to be coming from a teenage girl (Juliette Gosselin) racing down a flight of stairs in her pyjamas, hair tangled as if she’d just leapt out of bed. Without pausing, she glances over her shoulder at her unseen pursuer, whose perspective we share, the camera barrelling after her from behind. As she reaches the bottom of the stairs, she slips and falls on the polished wooden floor, crawling a few steps on her hands and knees, then scrambling to her feet and pressing onward down a corridor. But it’s too late: her pursuer catches up, tackles her and brings her to the ground. For a few seconds she struggles, till her gasps of apparent terror give way to squeals of laughter. The pair are brother and sister, and she’s stolen a letter from his girlfriend he’s desperate to retrieve. Dad intervenes, she yields up the prize, but as she sits against the wall catching her breath she’s grinning all over her flushed face, and can’t resist taunting her brother till he leaps on her once again.