This is not statistically significant in any global sense. It’s just a slice of life that might be an instructive microcosm. There’s a town in Wales where 99 young people committed suicide by hanging in the space of five years. Apparently, the phenomenon continues, although the press and the police have stopped reporting on it for fear that publicity encourages it. The movie is a documentary exploring the extraordinary proliferation of one kind of suicide in one specific demographic.

There’s very little offered in the way of answers. Mostly lots of reactions by parents, friends of the dead, and locals speculating about why this became a distinct trend in an area of modest population.

Lots of mothers, some fathers, numerous young folk, all offering theories and attempts at explanation. Too much alcohol and drugs, too little hope about the prospects of life, too little too late support from the U.K.’s National Health Service. (Suicidal? Come back Monday.) Hardly any serious outreach by the police, a depressing and fairly violent environment in a town of 40,000 dominated by what The Great Society would have called “projects.” Almost no references to the quality of education, religious belief, and economic opportunity.

But lots of tearful parents wondering what went so drastically wrong. Plenty of broken hearts. And multiple shocking challenges to one’s ability to read character and intention.

I was telling my wife about it on the phone midway through and, flippantly, I suggested the answer was tattoos. It seemed that almost all the suicides had them, and I was minded of the way characters were rendered in the Iliad. Always by external physical traits and bits of costumery — armor and helms and symbols — as if there was no real conscious mentality inside. The person was the body and its decorations, no more, no less.

Imagine my surprise when the final thoughtful interviews were not with parents or youngsters but the proprietors of a tattoo parlor. Their depressing experience was of youngsters coming in to get tattoos of remembrance and killing themselves a few days or weeks later. They weren’t youngsters themselves and were plainly terrified of the ramifications of their next encounters with their own sons and daughters. What’s a provocative intent to have serious conversation? What’s overlooking too much in a clearly dangerous environment. Who are our kids, really?

I don’t know the answers any better than the film makers did. But I do wonder just how far today’s kids will go to experience the sense of being alive, even if it’s their last moment alive. Because my sense is that they don’t feel alive, don’t know much feeling at all.