[COLUMN] The New Cinema of Grief | by Darren Mooney

Note: Given this piece is about death in contemporary pop culture, you should expect spoilers for a lot of films. There are so many of them it’s almost impossible to list all of them - and listing them would amount to a spoiler of itself. So proceed with caution!

Over the past couple of years, populist cinema has returned repeatedly to the question of grief. It’s fairly standard for blockbusters to put characters in life-and-death situations, allowing heroes to face impossible odds and emerge triumphant. In recent years, however, there has been a sense that the Grim Reaper cannot always be cheated. In these films and television shows, death is an unavoidable – and perhaps even desirable – part of life.

28 Years Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s zombie legacyquel, might be the most obvious recent example. In a post-apocalyptic Britain, a young boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) guides his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) through the wasteland in the hopes that Doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) will be able cure the mystery illness affecting her. Instead, Kelson discovers that Isla has cancer in her brain and lymph nodes. The diagnosis is terminal. All that Kelson can offer is a pain-free death.

“There are many kinds of death,” Kelson advises Spike. “And some are better than others.” Spike finds Kelson out among a monument that Kelson has constructed from human remains, an artistic expression of the inevitability of death. “The memento mori is actualized,” Kelson explains of his project. This forest built from human bones around a pillar of human skulls, is a reminder that death is just a part of life. “Memento mori,” Kelson translates to Spike. “Remember you must die.”

28 Years Later is a zombie movie about the inevitability of death. However, it is not the only recent movie preoccupied with human mortality. Final Destination: Bloodlines revives a franchise in which death itself stalks those who have cheated it. The Monkey focuses on a strange toy that causes a random death to occur every time that it is triggered. Until Dawn finds a group of teenagers wandering into a bizarre set-up where they are murdered over and over, but not allowed to rest.

Directed by the Philippou brothers, Bring Her Back tells the story of social worker Laura (Sally Hawkins), who is trying to resurrect her lost daughter Cathy (Mischa Heywood). This makes a nice companion piece to the pair’s previous film, Talk to Me, released three years ago, about a teenager named Mia (Sophie Wilde) who becomes obsessed with an occult artifact that allows her to commune with her dead mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen).

In many of these movies, the horror doesn’t come from death itself, but the refusal to accept death. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners tells the story of musician Samuel "Sammie" Moore (Miles Caton), who survives an attack by vampires. Years later, an older Sammie (Buddy Guy) is tracked down by a vampirized version of his old friend Stack (Michael B. Jordan), who offers Sammie immortal life. Sammie politely declines, having lived long enough. There is no shame in facing death.

Last year, A Quiet Place: Day One was one of the more impressive surprises of the blockbuster season. A prequel to the two Quiet Place films, Day One depicted the alien invasion that started the franchise. However, it did so through the eyes of Sam (Lupita Nyong'o), a dying cancer patient. The final moments of the film are Sam accepting her inevitable death, luring the creatures to her by playing Nina Simone’s Feelin’ Good in an empty and abandoned post-apocalyptic New York.

Of course, these are all horror films to one degree or another. Death is a very primal anxiety, and so it makes sense for the genre to explore those fears. However, this preoccupation with the inevitability and inescapability of death extends beyond horror. Mike Flannagan’s The Life of Chuck, an adaptation of a Stephen King novella, won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and unfolds entirely within the dying cancer-addled brain of Charles "Chuck" Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) as he contemplates his life.

The Life of Chuck opens with a vignette focused on Marty Anderson, a teacher played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ejiofor plays a similar role in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, where he is cast as Scott Walliker, a teacher tasked with helping Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) to explain the death of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) to Bridget and Mark’s two children, Billy (Casper Knopf) and Mabel (Mila Jankovic). It is a tender film about grief and loss, symbolized by a white owl perched at the children’s window. At the end, the owl flies off. Grief is lifted.

In this context, there is something endearingly conventional about John Crowley’s We Live in Time, which is an old-fashioned weepie about Almut Brühl (Florence Pugh) trying to make the best of the time she has following a terminal cancer diagnosis. However, the film is notable for its non-linear structure and for the emphasis that it places on Almut’s surviving husband Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and her daughter Ella (Grace Delaney).

Many of these films are about teaching children how to grieve, like Spike in 28 Years Later or Mia in Talk to Me. As such, it makes sense that several recent movies aimed at children are also built around this idea of accepting mortality. In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Puss (Antonio Banderas) faces – and inevitably accepts – that he has exhausted all but the last of his nine lives. In IF, Bea (Cailey Fleming) mourns her recently deceased mother (Catherine Daddario) as her father (John Krasinski) faces risky surgery.

In Sonic the Hedgehog 3, both Shadow the Hedgehog (Keanu Reeves) and Gerald Robotnik (Jim Carrey) find themselves traumatized by the accidental death of Robotnik’s granddaughter, Maria (Alyla Browne). The young girl’s death pushes Shadow and Gerald to embrace a grim nihilism that culminates in a plot to destroy the world. However, Shadow is eventually able to come to terms with the tragic loss, sacrificing himself to save the world from Gerald’s evil plan.

It is also a major preoccupation of auteurs. Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme finds Anatole Korda (Benicio del Toro) reconnecting with his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), naming her as his heir after a near-death experience that puts him before God (Bill Murray). The theme of grief was also central to Anderson’s previous film, Asteroid City, about a grieving father (Jason Schwartzman) trying to figure out how to explain the death of his wife (Margot Robbie) to their children.

David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is built around widower Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who is dealing so poorly with the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) that he has launched a startup company that allows users to livestream the decaying remains of their loved ones. Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada finds dying documentarian Leonard “Leo” Fife (Richard Gere) trying to confess his sins to his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), to settle his accounts before shuffling off the mortal coil.

This mortality is arguably even part of modern blockbusters. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is about Shuri’s (Letitia Wright) difficulty mourning her brother T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman). Venom: The Last Dance ends with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) mourning the passing of his symbiote Venom (also Hardy). Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) processing the death of both her father (Mark Heenehan, Charlie Hopkinson) and eventually her mother (Catherine O'Hara).

While discussing modern blockbusters, it is worth noting how many recent franchise films have gone out of their way to end with the death of their central character: Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) in Joker: Folie á Deux, James Bond (Daniel Craig) in No Time to Die, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) in John Wick: Chapter 4. This is particularly notable since the death of Bond and Wick has done little to slow down the march of their franchises.

It is perhaps possible to explain some of these examples as parts of smaller microtrends. For example, many of these established directors are getting old and facing mortality. David Cronenberg is 82 years old, and The Shrouds is clearly a response to the death of his wife. Paul Schrader is 78 years old, and checked himself into assisted living to be with his wife. Tim Burton is 66, and the death of Lydia’s father in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was inspired by nightmares about his own death. Danny Boyle is 68 years old.

At the other extreme, the preoccupation with death in many of these franchise films might be an expression of “franchise fatigue”, an expression of the exhaustion that creatives must feel at having to churn out sequel after sequel. This is nothing new. In Jo’s Boys, the second sequel to Little Women, Margaret Alcott’s wryly noted her desire to end the saga with an earthquake that would bury Jo’s school “and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no [archaeologist] could ever find a vestige of it.”

Still, taken all together, there is clearly something in the air, something working its way through the popular consciousness and finding expression in popular media. Death is everywhere, but not as some adversary to be defeated and outwitted. Instead, these stories are about the necessity of confronting and accepting death, understanding it as a necessary – and perhaps even desirable – part of life.

Much has been made of whether audiences are ready to confront the experience of the recent global pandemic on screen, recently in Ari Aster’s Eddington, but also in films like Songbird or Sick. There is a general feeling that the period is best ignored, that viewers have no desire to revisit that era of lockdowns and masking any more than earlier generations wished to see – or even read – depictions of the Spanish Flu.

Still, the sense-memory of the pandemic bleeds into contemporary cinema. For example, there are shadows of lockdown to be found in the myriad of recent films about quarantined or isolated communities or people – from Asteroid City to Oppenheimer to Project Hail Mary. Prestige cinema’s renewed preoccupation with complicated and suffocating marriages feels similarly rooted in the experience of lockdown.

This preoccupation with mortality – and often the difficulty of explaining it to a child – feels like a response to the enormity of what happened. The World Health Organization reports over seven million deaths as a direct result of the disease, but it also suggests that the actual death toll may be more than twice as high. In New York, the death toll so far exceeded the city’s medical capacity that bodies had to be stored in refrigerated trucks.

Due to safety protocols, many people could not visit their relatives as they were dying and so never got to properly say goodbye. In the years since, there have been no plans for a formal memorial or even a day of grieving. Instead, there has been a rush to get things “back to normal.” As such, it seems inevitable that those who lost loved ones in the pandemic can struggle with “prolonged grief disorder”, with one study suggesting that every death left nine grieving survivors.

In this context, it is perhaps no surprise that death and grief have become a major focus of contemporary pop culture, from awards fare to children’s films to big summer blockbusters. There is a sense of something simmering unarticulated in the collective consciousness, bubbling through the movies in interesting and unexpected ways. None of these films are literally about the pandemic or the disease or the specifics of that moment, but they feel tied into the emotion of it.

It’s mourning in the cinema.