 McDonagh noted that two sexually charged flashbacks are key to understanding Tenebrae . These distinct but strongly related memory fragments are introduced repeatedly throughout the film , usually immediately following a murder sequence . Although the flashbacks are never fully explained , the first reveals a beautiful young woman 's sexual humiliation ( though oral rape ) of a teenage boy , presumed to be Peter Neal . The young woman is mostly topless during this first sequence , and she humiliates the young man by jamming the heel of one of her shiny red shoes into his mouth while he is held down by a group of gleeful boys on a pale @-@ white beach . The second flashback shows the vicious revenge @-@ murder of the woman some time later . McDonagh notes that all of the fetishistic imagery of these flashbacks , combined with the sadistic details of the murder sequences in the main narrative , " set the parameters of Tenebrae 's fetishistic and fetishicized visual vocabulary , couched in terms both ritualistic and orgiastically out of control ... Peter Neal indulges in sins of the flesh and Tenebrae revels in them , inviting the spectator to join in ; in fact , it dares the viewer not to do so . " 
