“The film’s experiment gradually begins to crumble under its own weight.”

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love” – When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, Walt Whitman

From the very beginning, Rafael Palacio Illingworth’s autofiction experiment Alma, an oversimplified title compared to its original and more poetic one, Alma: Eine Geschichte über Hoffnung im Tod (A Story about Hope in Death), establishes its central aim: to recreate a fictionalized version of Illingworth, his deceased wife, and their children. Death, while a certainty in every life, resists our need for meaning. It owes nothing to those it touches. Perhaps as a way to rebel against this absence of logic, Illingworth reimagines his wife’s passing as a mysterious disappearance in the Swiss Alps, thereby constructing a more narratively coherent final chapter for their life together.

In this sense, through the recreation of romantic scenes and parenting moments, the film’s first, and most compelling, section is built entirely around a meta-cinematic construction of scenes. Action becomes the operative principle, as Illingworth directs his own family members while reconstructing fragments of memory. There is a striking contrast between the warmth of his home and its physical confinement: he and his children are constantly shown sleeping close together, embracing, eating, and sharing space, almost always framed within the same interior environment, which is opposed to the cold openness of the Alps.

In many ways, everything is arranged to blur, or at least attempt to blur, the boundaries between reality and fiction. However, perhaps because the documentary impulse is so focused on the tension between lived experience and narrative construction, neither dimension is fully developed. As a result, the film’s experiment gradually begins to crumble under its own weight.

In other words, Alma is, throughout, an attempt to make sense of the senseless death of Illingworth’s wife. It is primarily about his grieving process and his memories; everything else becomes secondary, even certain structural decisions that arguably deserve greater prominence. One such choice is the casting of his own daughters, which adds little dramatic weight, as the film remains more concerned with the alternative reconstruction of his wife’s death and his subsequent return to the mountains to close that chapter of his life.

In every scene, his wife is portrayed by another actress, and this character is constantly situated between two roles: that of a performer under the director’s commands (“Maybe you should just walk and talk about the mess!“), and that of a maternal, ghost-like presence caring for him. It is also notable how Illingworth’s own body is frequently shown half-naked, and at times weakened in shadow, an image that clearly evokes the deterioration of a corpse.

Unfortunately, each attempt to present himself as a fragile, broken figure is undercut by the very next scene, as is the sense of the considerable effort and emotional strain required to complete this project. For it takes strength to write about those who are gone, and to continue living when there was no opportunity to say goodbye or even bury their bodies. This is, after all, a post-COVID world, one marked by war and genocide. However, it takes even greater courage to write final words on behalf of the departed, to look at images of dead bodies of people who died in the mountains, knowing that his own wife is not among them, and to ask his family to perform alongside the reimagined version of a person they lost.

Circling back to the poem by Walt Whitman that opens this text, one might say that the film finds its most truthful register not in the grand, imagined expanse of the Alps, but in the secluded, domestic space where a quieter, necessary song can emerge, a “song of the bleeding throat […] If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die,” and where this narrative experiment might have found grounds to flourish.