![Visceral, Unflinching, and Unpleasant Historical Horror [Fantastic Fest]](https://www.dreadcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/ONES_WHO_GRIEVE_Still.jpg "Visceral, Unflinching, and Unpleasant Historical Horror [Fantastic Fest]")
The Devil’s Bath, from filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, was one of my favorite horror movies of 2024. Historical horror is more austere and oppressive than most, though in service to its profoundly affecting metaphor, The Devil’s Bath earned its unflinching depiction of patriarchal violence and unrelenting cruelty. The Ones Who Grieve (Les Âmes en peine), helmed by French auteur Quarxx, is similarly nihilistic and cruel, though it begs the question: beyond the cyclical nature of violence, what’s the point?
Zélie (Zélie Rixhon) lives under the perverse authority of her father, Jacob (Thierry Frémont), in rural France at the end of the 19th century. Their community and the surrounding region have been plagued by the “Black Veil,” a mysterious ailment that turns those afflicted into monsters with an appetite for human flesh. Jacob works as a “Masker,” ostensibly a medical role (though more a spiritual one), whereby he sews shut the eyes and mouths of the sick, adorns them with a wooden mask, and abandons them in the woods.
The raison d’être is scripture, principally the mortal sin of taking another’s life. Jacob isn’t killing these “souls in pain.” Instead, he’s neutralizing the harm and allowing nature to carry out the rest. The savagery is conspicuous in The Ones Who Grieve’s first major set piece – Jacob’s operation on a frightened child.
The violence is shocking (against children, it always is), yet it’s only a prelude to the depravity in store. Akin to an artifact from the French Extremity era, The Ones Who Grieve features graphic depictions of sexual violence, rape, mutilation (of the flesh and genitals), cannibalism, incest, and more.
For some, that’s an invitation. Quarxx’s historical setting is more evocative than most, and while it’s not quite Anna Biller, it is as ethereal and haunting as the rural countryside seen in The Vourdalak several years back. It’s a handsomely made picture (despite Benjamin Leray’s incongruous score), and it compounds the efficacy of the ever-escalating violence depicted.
For some, that might feel like an invitation. This is, after all, genre filmmaking at its most uncompromised. While there are loose threads here and there, and The Ones Who Grieve retains a linear narrative structure, it’s not a conventional story so much as it is a series of gruesome vignettes that simply are.
Rixhon, her mother, Emilie (Isabelle Anciaux), and Frémont all turn in good performances, even if they’re constrained by the material. The women are there to be miserable and brutalized, and Jacob, while terrifying, exists strictly as a monster. It’s certainly sinister, and the full weight of historic misogyny won’t be missed on anyone (“I have fathered a succubus. Because of you, I will go to Hell.”), but it doesn’t permit any nuance of a larger point beyond the cruel nature of the world that was and is.
Death might be the order of things, and in The Ones Who Grieve, it is. As an endurance test, the film certainly succeeds. There’s lots of rot and fluids – the violence is wet and visceral. It’s almost like the Devil himself imbued the script (co-written by Frederic Soulier) with the most barbaric acts of depravity imaginable. I had to look away regularly, and that’s no small feat. Even the ostensible good guys aren’t immune – the righteous and modern bit players themselves subject women to immense agony and torture.
Yet, as previewed, for as intense and uncompromising as it all is, I’m left hollow. Quarxx certainly has a point – I won’t dispute that– but it was too mired in unpleasantness to leave much of a lasting impact on me. I simply wanted to take a shower and wash the putrescence from my mind and body. Even the ending, where, yes, the tables turn, and the victims are given an opportunity to dole out the same torment, landed with a whimper. For as much as they endured, I’m not sure any kind of revenge or subversion of perpetrator/victim would have left me satisfied. For the Midnight Movie crowd, those bemoaning horror’s contemporary scaling back from confrontation, The Ones Who Grieve is a winner. For everyone else, it’s simply a stark reminder of how awful the world can be. Three cheers for nihilism, fewer for its cinematic counterpart.
Summary
Nihilistic and cruel, The Ones Who Grieve makes for a visceral, though regularly unpleasant, experience.
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