French auteur Alain Guiraudie continues his Hitchcockian streak with this slippery, eccentric story of a provincial French family in mourning and the chaos that arrives with the prodigal return of a disquieting family friend.
A slippery, changeable parable about a particularly amoral cuckoo looking to feather a new nest.
Misericordia 2024
Miséricorde
This coolly eccentric new film from Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, NZIFF 2013) drops into the provincial French community of Saint-Martial, where the return of the boyish Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) awakens repressed, feral desires.
Ostensibly in the village to pay respects to the recently-passed baker, Jérémie is an alluring presence, bouncing from the houses of the baker’s intimidating son Vincent (Jean- Baptiste Durand), his cougar-ish mother Martine (Catherine Frot), portly recluse Walter (David Ayala) and agonised local priest Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), who is alarmed by the need Jérémie inflames within him. A brutal murder in the fecund, mushroom-rich woods that surround the town thickens the plot, as this motley crew circles the moral drain.
Pulsating with drip-fed Hitchcockian menace, this novelistic thriller merges the metaphysical with the hilariously parochial concerns of small-town France. All the while, Guiraudie retains a strident queer frankness, both ominous and sensual. Unsettlingly malicious and perversely offbeat, Misericordia cements his position as a morbid storyteller of the highest order. — Tom Augustine