Buried: Iron Lung (2026)
The movie takes place entirely within a small, crude submarine at the bottom of an ocean of blood. The sub is emphasized throughout to be a creaking, hot, suffocating space that constantly leaking blood and always under threat of breaking under the pressure of the ocean. There are multiple scenes of the main character Simon crawling in the crawl space under the floor (one of which has the small duct rapidly filling with blood). It acts as both the Simon r's lifeline as well as his coffin - the only thing keeping him from being crushed under the weight of a sea of blood and the thing that will ultimately kill him, whether from the radiation poisoning from the camera, or the eventual depletion of his oxygen, or when it lets in too much blood and he drowns. He is literally welded inside a metal box with no way out, desperately scrambling for survival while under the weight of an ocean of blood. Neither Simon nor the audience are ever allowed to leave it.
There is also the metaphorical side of the Buried present here. Simon lacks any true freedom over his life, both as a prisoner of the COI (who gave him the option of life imprisonment or a risky operation with the promise of freedom they might deliver on), as a member of Eden (a death cult he was either born into or left in the care of at a young age) and narratively speaking (again, he was doomed from the moment he stepped inside the sub), he is always pushed into what's happening in his life and must bear the consequences of it regardless. There's the guilt of the hand he played in the station's destruction and the loss of hundreds of lives that weighs on him constantly. There's the weight of humanity's possible future weighing on his shoulders, with the data the black box carries potentially being a chance at saving what little remains of them. The movie bleeds (pardon the pun) the Buried in nearly ever aspect of both it's narrative and it's film making.
Desolation: Martyrs (2008)
Martyrs is a 2008 horror film written and directed by Pascal Laugier, starring Morjane Alaoui and Mylène Jampanoï. Due to its pervasive graphic violence and bleak themes, it's a heavily polarizing film often deemed one of the most disturbing of all time, and it's one of the most well-known films associated with the New French Extremity movement.
The story is about Lucie, a torture victim who escapes from her captors. She's sent to an orphanage where she meets and befriends Anna, a fellow child abuse victim. While the police and the media investigated Lucie's predicament, the perpetrators were never caught, so Anna pledges to help Lucie track them down. Fifteen years later, Lucie seizes the chance to have her revenge, and things spiral out of control from there.
The Desolation is the fear of pain and loss, and in my opinion this is most Desolation-coded movie I've know of. The cult behind the plot of the movie are even somewhat similar to the cult of the Lightless Flame: Just as the cult of the Lightless Flame's members are enriched by destroying the lives of people who have things to live for and destroying things before their potential is realised, the cult of torturers utterly destroy their victims (their "martyrs") both physically and psychologically to "transcend" them. And while the motive we are given for their actions is End-coded (They want to know what their victims see when they are on the boundary between life and death to know what the afterlife looks like), their M.O couldn't be more Desolation-aligned.
Film Tournament Winners Round 1 Bout 8
Buried: Iron Lung (2026)
Martyrs (2008)
Voting ended onMay 25
