The Flagellant

Dehlia has always lived in a “greenhouse” of a wealthy and all-comfortable life, provided with everything she wanted by her loving husband and after his death - by her son Martin.

When Martin turns 30, he makes a decision to stop what he has been doing practically all these years after college.

He has long realized that his whole life is nothing but commuting to London and back every day, endless hours of work – well-paid, yes, but not at all what he would like to be doing for a living if he had a choice - and absolute loneliness, all for the sake of his mother’s comfort and ability to keep up the life style she is used to.

It took him quite a while to bring himself to this decision but there comes a point when he can take no more of it.

He stops going to work, locks himself in his room and finds a bizarre way of escaping the bitter reality.

He once read that during the plague some people used to distract themselves from the idea of imminent death by flogging themselves into ecstatic states.

So, Martin proceeds to excoriating the plague of a life he has been living by adopting that medieval religious practice of self-flagellation (self-whipping).

During self-flogging the ecstatic states of mind a person can get into experiences hallucinations, and that is what happens to Martin.

The harsher he beats himself, the more enchanting and fairy tale-like visions of breathtakingly beautiful women open before his eyes. A lovely, but weak and passive woman, who never had to deal with any problems herself and was so used to being pampered and took it so much for granted that she overlooked her son’s despair, now Dehlia is at a loss.

She does not know what to do with emotionally broken Martin whose weird passion is getting more and more dangerous.

To get his visions more real, Martin needs to feel more and more pain, balancing on the edge of hurting himself beyond repair or even killing himself.

Forced by the circumstances, for the first time in her life, Dehlia will have to step over herself and act confronting her son before it is too late.