The Ones Who Grieve (Les âmes en peine) North American première at Fantastic Fest, 18th Sept 2026
The Ones Who Grieve (Les âmes en peine) opens with two sequences playing in parallel. In the first, a middle-aged man (Thierry Frémont) with a prominent red beard carves a grotesque mask from wood, and is then seen shooting in the head a child locked into the mask, and reappropriating for himself the padlock before humming and praying over the corpse. In the second, a young woman (Zélie Rixhon) takes a rabbit from a hutch and reluctantly kills and skins it in a farmyard, feeding the discards to the greedy chickens around her. These two sequences merge as the man returns to the farm, stands close – indeed too close – behind the young woman (who visibly bristles at his unwelcome touch), roughly corrects her cutting motions with his hands on hers, and then insists that she recite verses from the Bible on the love of God and family.
This is our introduction to Jacob and Zélie van Veren. It is already apparent that writer/director Quarxx’s The Ones Who Grieve is to be a film not only about the food chain and different kinds of carnal appetite, but also about death and the ethics of killing – and that Jacob is a bully and a thief, with ungodly feelings towards his own child and a capacity to murder other children, who conceals his outrages behind a mask of religious fervour. What ensues is indeed the story of a father and a daughter, unfolding in a late-nineteenth-century alternative universe where Nikola Tesla, still partnered with Thomas Edison in the United States, has been so successful in his experiments with wireless power that a new transmission tower has appeared even in this remote canton in the French backwoods.
There is also a new pandemic ravaging the five continents. Known as ‘the Black Veil’, its arbitrary victims, variously termed ‘scavengers’ or ‘souls in pain’, have blackened eyes and rapid cognitive decline, and become compulsive devourers of human flesh – except that they feed only on the dead while leaving the living entirely alone. Although they are non-infectious, essentially harmless and resemble sufferers of dementia more than zombies, their otherness and peculiar appetite has made them an affront to society. The laws of God and of the state forbid killing them in cold blood – but a strange, superstitious ritual has evolved wherein the infected are, as the law requires, handed over by friends and relatives to appointed ‘Maskers’ who remove their teeth with pliers, sew up their eyes and mouths, encase their heads in wooden masks, and leave them to wander the land in blind agony and confusion until exposure and starvation take their course.
‘Masking’ is an inherently cruel practice which attracts cruel men – and the supposedly devout Jacob is a natural in a rôle that allows him to preach his righteousness and superiority while committing serial acts of abuse and torture on the meek, the mute and the innocent – and on top of all this, he is illegally tracking and shooting those whom he has mutilated so that he can retrieve the expensive padlocks that he has placed on their masks. Jacob is also a tyrant in his own home. His abuse and violence have driven his weak, submissive wife Emilie (Isabelle Anciaux) to compulsive eating for comfort, and have left clever, compassionate Zélie in constant fear of what he might do to her. Both Emilie and Zélie already bear the scars of Jacob’s controlling punishments, but unlike Emilie, Zélie quietly questions and rebels against his rule, letting the injured, infected soldier Gabriel (Jean-Baptiste Maunier) hide out in their barn, and secretly reading a copy of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) given to her by local, independent provisioner Jeanne Farlane (Ophélia Kolb). Jeanne runs the nearby farm, in the absence of her beloved husband, with help from Carmin (Quentin Lasbazeilles), a disabled young man whom Jeanne and Zélie, alone in the community, treat with a modicum of respect.
Warned by Jeanne and even by local policeman Rodez to make her own choices before it is too late, Zélie finds her every attempt to assert herself or to get away from Jacob met with repressive, crippling punishment. Jacob is all at once a controlling sadist and a monstrous hypocrite, himself failing to meet any of the Biblical standards he so strictly imposes on others, and committing every sin in the Book. Yet other male authorities do not come off much better. As he experiments with electricity to control the appetites of the infected, the arrogant senior doctor Julius Oliphant treats his students with contempt, is as violently opposed to religion as Jacob is to science, parades a female patient naked before an assembly of male doctors, and tortures her with much the same zeal as Jacob. Meanwhile a local priest finds a balance between science and religion, but sells out his pulpit to a corporate pitchman. Even the lowly rejected pig herder Carmin proves to have no real concern for, or interest in, how the object of his affections feels, or indeed whether she gives consent. The real problem here is patriarchy, which Jacob just happens to embody to toxic perfection – and given the film’s forward glances to our own ‘wired’ age or electrical appliances, the internet and of course Covid, where superstition and rationalism remain polarising forces and where malicious, narcissistic, abusive men continue to hold positions of authority, Quarxx’s thesis would appear to be that patriarchy, like Jacob himself, is a plague that is very hard to escape or end.
What’s in a name? Though called The Ones Who Grieve in English, this film’s original French title Les âmes en peine, literally ‘souls in torment’ or ‘souls in distress’, is the equivalent of ‘lost souls’ – and while it is an expression used in the film to denote the infected and the torture to which they are submitted, it might equally be used to describe the uninfected characters, who are similarly caught in, and damned by, a system that objectifies, bestialises and demonises any kind of otherness (as perceived and defined by males in positions of power). Of course, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet – and there is indeed a character named Rose here too, who, as one of the infected, is no longer quite herself but remains all too human, and too inhumanely treated. Zélie will eventually take a leaf out of her own father’s book in executing her Old Testament revenge – but in the end she will still be faced with fighting the same old battle ad nauseam and perhaps ad infinitum.
Set, like Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks (Cuanso acecha la maldad, 2023), in an alternative apocalyptic world with its own evolved practices and lore, The Ones Who Grieve offers a bleak vision of existence as a hell on earth, where injustice and suffering prevail. There is dark humour here too, especially in the Python-esque banter between two carriage-riding corpse collectors who make an illicit habit of picking up the not quite dead – but for the most part this is a grim portrait of men repeating long-exhausted plays for power and perversion, and women either bearing the brunt of these, or acting in complicity with them. As Zélie tells her mother, no matter what she does or does not do, “it will end badly anyway.”
strap: Quarxx’s apocalyptic period folk horror shows patriarchy, in all its toxic perversion, as an incurable plague
© Anton Bitel
