Torment 2008

Justine Fielding, the top student and de facto queen bee at Fairview High, finds herself pulled into a dangerous maze of social status, secrets, and a nightmarish past that refuses to stay buried. The film opens with a grim image: Justine, the “head girl,” being escorted out of the school by police while fellow pupils watch with a mix of awe and fear. The malaise behind the cheer is built on years of mean-spirited hierarchies, but the true horror begins with a funeral.

Five days earlier, Darren Mullet—a shy, asthmatic boy who never quite fit into the school’s social pecking order—dies, and the mood at his funeral is uneasy more than mournful. His unpopular friend Jason Banks is forcibly removed from the church by the same sadistic P.E. teacher who polices the classroom’s mood, after Jason calls Justine a hypocrite for not really knowing Mullet. The event foreshadows a line between cruelty and sympathy that many in Justine’s circle will cross or ignore. When Justine agrees to attend a party organized by the popular crowd—led by Bradley, Tasha, Khalillah, Sophie, Marcus, and their entourages—she steps further into a social orbit where approval comes at a price.

At the party, the tone shifts from glitter to malice in rapid succession. The DJ Jez, egged on by Tasha, spits a rap that skewers Justine, and she is publicly humiliated. Bradley is quick to retaliate, ejecting Jez from the party, while Mullet’s name and past loom over the room in text messages that ghost into the night: calls and taunts purge into the phones of those who once pretended to be Justine’s friends. The party’s façade is cracked when Alex, one of the popular kids, and Justine retreat to a bedroom to kiss, only to become the target of a cruel prank by Bradley, who dresses in a clown suit and pretends to attack them with a chainsaw. The party’s celebrations abruptly turn sour as the crowd pays homage to Mullet’s memory in a way that feels hollow and cruel. The moment is a turning point: Justine, who didn’t know Mullet well, finds herself at the crossroads of indifference and empathy.

After the party, the school’s social climate grows colder. Justine abandons old friends Helena and Emily to align with the in-crowd, a choice that is mirrored by the disturbing discovery of a teddy bear in her locker—an item that seems stolen from Mullet’s grave. If Justine had hoped this would be a simple night, she quickly learns that a single decision can ripple through the lives of many, dredging up guilt and fear. Meanwhile, the specter of Mullet is not content to stay buried. In the recording studio, Mullet’s ghost compels Nasser to listen to music at such a blare that he becomes deaf, a chilling example of the haunting’s reach.

Rumors and darker truths begin to collide. Jason reveals that Mullet’s suicide was driven in part by relentless bullying, including vicious texts and a website created to humiliate him. Alex’s friends warn her not to hand over the note that could prove Mullet’s account, a note that would implicate Justine in the boy’s death. The school’s bathrooms become a stage for the group’s unraveling, as Justine’s former friends are attacked, and the social fabric that tied them together withers under pressure. The ghost’s influence intensifies in the gym and water, where Sophie’s fate is sealed after she leaves the pool to retrieve her watch and drowns.

As the haunting grows more personal, Mullet’s spectral presence begins to manipulate the living with symbolic acts of punishment. He brings flowers to Justine, but, upon witnessing Justine’s behavior with Alex, tears her badge from her uniform and rearranges the fridge magnets in her home—an eerie reminder that the dead see and remember more than the living want to admit. The haunting becomes corporeal: Marcus, during football training, is driven into a state of terror, then fatally impaled on a fence after a brutal confrontation with the ghost. The group’s dynamics fracture further as Tasha and Bradley’s relationship is tested, culminating in a violent, predatory moment in a car that ends with Bradley’s death and a macabre twist as Tasha nearly escapes, only to be dragged into an open grave and decapitated by Mullet.

The truth behind Mullet’s influence begins to surface in a brutal cascade of revelations. Justine confronts Jason in the art room and learns that she was perhaps more complicit than she realized, even as he admits that he too was trapped by fear of bullying and thus played a role in the cruelty that festered around Mullet. A silent plea to those she once trusted goes unanswered as Justine’s social world shows its true colors. Khalillah is lured to the art room by a fake message that seems to come from a friend, only to become another victim of Mullet’s vengeance: the ghost places a plastic bag over her head and amputates her hands with a guillotine—an act that leaves Justine and Alex to face the grim reality that their former classmate’s despair has become a literal, deadly weapon.

Justine and Alex arrive just as the worst happens: they find Jason and Khalillah’s bodies and are attacked by the enraged spirit. They fight back with a screwdriver, managing to stab Mullet but not stopping him. The chase ends in the common room, where Mullet nails Alex’s hand to the floor with the screwdriver. Justine’s quick thinking becomes a last line of defense as she seizes an inhaler—one of the items that will prove pivotal to the film’s final act—and hurls it across the room to disrupt Mullet’s leverage. Alex smashes the inhaler, and for a moment the ghost weakens, but he regains strength when he recovers another inhaler he had hidden away, a cruel twist that ties the haunting to a very human artifact of fear and dependency.

The struggle escalates to a brutal climax: Mullet stabs Alex in the throat with the screwdriver before vanishing, and the police arrive, tipped off by the discovery of Justine’s badge near the bodies of Bradley and Tasha. Justine is escorted away in a police vehicle, her future now divided between the weight of what she did and the darkness that still lingers in the hallways of Fairview High.

In the end, the film threads a single, haunting thread through a landscape of bullying, friendship, and the consequences of turning a blind eye. The ghost’s retribution is terrible and unambiguous, a mirror held up to a school culture that allowed cruelty to fester until it could no longer be contained. Justine’s arrest stands not just as a legal consequence, but as a stark reminder of how the line between complicity and responsibility can blur in a landscape where popularity can feel like protection, and where the past, no matter how carefully buried, has an uncanny way of finding its way back into the present. The final image lingers on the quiet aftershock of a day when many believed they were safe, but the truth remains: some acts of bullying leave scars that no one can erase, and some ghosts refuse to rest. > The past is not past.