The Ones Who Grieve (2026)
Directed by Quarxx
Screenplay by Quarxx & Frederic Soulier
Starring Zelie Rixhon, Thierry Frémont, Isabelle Anciaux, & Ophélia Kolb.

Horror

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Quarxx’s latest film The Ones Who Grieve is a dark Gothic tale about a young woman called Zélie (Zelda Rixhon) who lives on a tiny farm during the late 19th century, where she exists under the thumb of her domineering father, Jacob (Thierry Frémont). Outside there’s a deadly pandemic that renders people into monstrous, flesh-eating creatures. Jacob is a masker, someone who ‘takes care’ of the infected in a uniquely horrific way. As life gets more bleak by the day, Zélie’s determined to find freedom beyond the farm and her maniacal father.

Quarxx and co-writer Frederic Soulier tell a story about a changing world at the turn of the 19th century, a world not only evolving technologically but, most importantly, socially. Jacob represents the tired, old world of strict patriarchal rule. And though that world never disappeared, The Ones Who Grieve addresses how that world was slowly becoming weaker as the 1800s drew to a close. It’s easy to draw parallels between Quarxx’s film and the world of the past 6 years since our own deadly pandemic first began. While a patriarchal order continues to dominate the world, it’s gradually getting weaker, the cracks are widening, and, like Zélie, people are becoming less satisfied with blindly accepting the terrible conditions of their current existence.

Amongst other things, The Ones Who Grieve deals with women being stuck under patriarchal rule. Jacob likens women’s minds to a toilet when he tells his daughter: “That’s the problem with women, you try to think, but it’s like waving a stick in a chamber pot, nothing good comes of it.” He treats his wife like an object, at once using her for sex and hopeful procreation to produce a male heir, and at the same time degrading her for her weight. He tells his wife she’s a punishment. Zélie suffers the same treatment as her mother, which eventually reaches hideous heights as the depressing plot wears on. Most telling is a local woman who keeps her dead husband, infected by the virus, in a barn; she keeps him there out of love. This sits in stark contrast against Jacob, who’s keeping his wife and daughter on his farm out of a need for power and control. Zélie even envies the dead, claiming that if “Hell exists, it can’t be worse than here.”

An interesting piece of The Ones Who Grieve is the inclusion of Nikolai Tesla, Tesla-Edison, and the encroaching world of electricity and electrical technology versus Jacob’s strict world of religious belief. Jacob prides himself as being protected by “the holy armour of faith” and calls himself a “soldier of God.” In one scene he reads a newspaper that boasts a front-page story about Tesla, electricity, and America, likely referring to when Tesla successfully used AC powered by a hydroelectric plant in Niagara Falls to transmit electricity to New York. Zélie thinks perhaps electricity could help people, but her tyrant father says that “science is only good for entertaining ignorant crowds.” He calls machines “infernal” and later beats a Tesla-Edison employee brutally at a church after the employee mentions how electricity will bring about many social changes, especially for women. Jacob feels his patriarchal control loosening for a number of reasons, including the march of technological progress. At the same time, Quarxx’s film deals with the continuing push for human rights, using the infected “scavengers” as a podium. A doctor gives a speech that echoes struggles related to COVID-19, which still continue now in 2026, and says that the infected pose no danger to society but rather they’re “a simple inconvenience for the healthy, a reminder of the fragility of existence.” He frames it as being the same argument as related to disability, mental illness, and more. So the progress knocking at Jacob’s door in The Ones Who Grieve is not only about technology, it’s about progress beyond the overall perspectives traditionally held in many societies.

The Ones Who Grieve is a grim tale with almost nothing but darkness to offer, addressing how what patriarchy fears most is progress. Yet patriarchy, like a virus, cannot be killed at this point. It’s spread too far, and for far too long. All we can do is contain it and lessen its destruction. The Ones Who Grieve may be suggesting that we have to turn the patriarchy’s tools and methods back against itself. Or, it could be much more in line with Audre Lorde’s quote from 1979, considering the very final moments of the film and the horrors it suggests: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”