Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia

Martine’s only son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), suspects that Jérémie may have designs on his mother, but while the erotic tension between Jérémie and Vincent is palpable, Jérémie actually has his eyes on Vincent’s friend, Walter (David Ayala). “Abetted by a brilliantly cast set of oddballs, from Vincent with his 1950s prizefighter frame to the unkempt Walter with his dirty undershirt straining across his belly to Martine with her air of elegant sexual worldliness to Father Philippe [Jacques Develay] who hides his excitement beneath his cassock, there hasn’t been a more exaggeratedly eccentric vision of French provincialism since Bruno Dumont established his Li’l Quinquin universe,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety.

Guiraudie’s eighth feature “fuses the more naturalistic register of Stranger by the Lake (2013) with the farcical, fabulist tendencies of such films as No Rest of the Brave (2003) and The King of Escape (2009),” writes Lawrence Garcia at In Review Online. “It is the finest showcase to date of Guiraudie’s uncanny ability to not just establish a coherent film-world, but continually transform the relations between the real and the imaginary that make it possible.”

All of Guiraudie’s films “pullulate with folks who share a near-molecular relationship with the places they inhabit,” writes Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage. “Which is to say that forests, lakes, and hills never operate as simple backgrounds, but in the same way landscapes do in Romantic paintings: as extensions of the characters’ inner lives, canvases that reflect and refract their tempestuous emotions.”

Misericordia takes a turn after a murder in the woods. “Foraging for roots with magical properties propelled The King of Escape into fantasy,” writes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, noting that “here, digging for fungi redirects the movie into thriller terrain—and, no less than David Fincher, Guiraudie can cut coverage of a conversation around a dinner table into something sneakily nerve-wracking and emphatically timed.”

Misericordia is “typically spiked with contradiction, absurdity, and touches of jovial raunchiness,” writes Jonathan Romney for Screen. “There is also a philosophical streak that suggests that Guiraudie, as well as using the thriller framework in the way of Claude Chabrol and Georges Simenon, is also channeling those French Catholic novelists who once inspired films like Under the Sun of Satan, Diary of a Country Priest, and Thérèse Desqueyroux.”

“True to the religious implications of its title, evoking the Christian imperative to compassion and mercy, Misericordia slowly reveals itself as an interrogation of individual and collective guilt,” writes Giovanni Marchini Camia for Film Comment, and he asks Guiraudie about how his Catholic upbringing seems to be increasingly informing his work—and about how the screenplay for Misericordia branched off and away from his 2021 novel Rabalaïre.

Writing his novels, “I work by adding, adding, adding. In cinema, I remove, remove, remove,” says Guiraudie. “I’ll admit that when we were shooting and [the priest] says, ‘We’re all responsible, even if it’s far from home,’ I thought a lot about Gaza. But it was written much earlier and these questions of guilt vis-à-vis the world’s misfortune, of conscience and culpability, have been around for a long time: how can I live my life and let this happen? We all manage to let it happen. The priest takes on a lot of my personal troubles, my questions, my inner conflict between tradition and modernity—or rather, my desire to be modern, to have a strong relationship with the present moment, and still live out my desires. In fact, he’s my favorite character, in both the novel and the film.”