The Ones Who Grieve

“Everything that you see here – even yourself, when you look in the mirror – it all belongs to me,” says Jacob (Thierry Frémont).

He’s preparing to take the family’s aged horse, Tonnerre, to slaughter. We have already seen his daughter, Zélie (Zelie Van Veren), kill a rabbit for dinner, feeding its entrails to their hens, but she feels differently about Tonnerre. She has known him since she was a little child. Jacob seems infuriated by her sentiment. He has been proud of his little girl, able to recite Bible verses on command. Now she is becoming increasingly wilful, increasingly distinct from him, even to the point of developing her own ideas about what is right and wrong. Still, he doesn’t quite grasp the depth of of her resentment. Across the course of the film, they will continue to push each other into more and more horrific situations.

This is a world not quite our own. Jacob and his family live like Medieval peasants, yet on the skyline is a gigantic metal structure, presumably one of what we will hear referred to later as “Mr. Tesla’s towers.” Some people blame this new fangled business with electricity for the Black Veil, the plague that is ravaging the land, first darkening the eyes and then leading to madness and unnatural appetites. Jacob is the Masker for the canton. He cannot cure the disease, he explains, but he can save the souls of the afflicted. When a mother is brought to him with her listless, mute black-eyed boy, he quickly establishes that she doesn’t know who the child’s father is, blames her for the child’s affliction, then extracts the child’s teeth and sews shut his eyes and mouth, before demanding that he be abandoned outside the jurisdiction.

Strapped into masks, the known afflicted are thus robbed of their humanity. Some people abuse them just because they can. It is a sin to commit murder, but not to let these helpless creatures starve. Zélie cannot bear it. When she finds an infected soldier hiding in the barn, she keeps his secret, just as she keeps secret the book that she is given by Jane (Ophélia Kolb), the woman who keeps the neighbouring farm, who has secrets of her own. She is frustrated by the passivity of her mother, Emilie (Isabelle Anciaux), who is plump, finding her only comfort in food, and is deeply ashamed of it, along with her failure to give Jacob a son. But as Zélie strives for independence, she comes to seem less like a child, more like a woman, and there is nothing about her situation that cannot get worse. Orders of magnitude worse.

It is plain from snippets of wider narrative, including a brief visit to a university in which we gain the perspective of learned men on what is happening, that people who behave like Jacob are considered extremists; yet in the canton, few dare to stand against him. When people offer to help Zélie she turns them down, convinced that nothing and no-one can keep her safe. Women do not need masks to deprive them of humanity. What use is a voice against someone who does not care to listen, or eyes to someone who is punished for using them?

In an age of monstrous men, Frément’s creation stands out. Like the greatest horror villains, he’s charismatic in his awfulness, so that you may well find yourself thrilled by his resilience in spite of everything. As villagers speculate over whether or not he is succumbing to madness, he is always willing to take things one step further. He seems to understand that any risk involved in pushing boundaries is balanced by the intimidatory effect of continually pushing people further.

A rich and involving tale with a lot to say about tyranny and resistance, about the different ways in which people resist and even exploit catastrophes, The Ones Who Grieve, which screened at Fantastic Fest 2026, is a film that will stay with you.

Reviewed on: 19 Sep 2026