What on earth do people want in Alain Guiraudie’s latest pitch-black murder-comedy? The director of Stranger by the Lake returns to the deadpan, sexually unstable working-class environs that have shaped many of his previous films with this pleasingly confounding tale of displaced characters and desires.
It starts as a sort of homecoming. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he grew up to attend the funeral of the local baker, his old mentor. He stays for a few days with the widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), who insists he is always welcome in the childhood bedroom of her son, Jérémie’s childhood buddy Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand).
Days pass and the irascible Vincent becomes increasingly annoyed by Jérémie’s presence, suspecting the interloper of having designs on his mother. Martine, meanwhile, wonders if Jérémie had an affair with her late husband. But Jérémie inexplicably seems drawn to the local day-drinking layabout, Walter (David Ayala).
Got all that? Hang tight for an inept murder and a mushroom-picking priest (Jacques Develay) who offers absolution in exchange for the hero’s attention.
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The heavily decorated Misericordia, named best film of 2024 by the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, offers a heady and murky marriage of enigmatic motivations, sexual and otherwise. The tone deftly shifts as interested parties, including the investigating cops, arrive in Jérémie’s bedroom with farcical regularity. The title, taken from the Latin for “mercy”, becomes a grift: who minds about murder as long as someone gets something in return?
Guiraudie boils and reduces the small-town comic conspiracy of Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry into philosophical inquiry. Kysyl is entertainingly mysterious as the omnisexual cuckoo. The cinematographer Claire Mathon’s pastoral renderings of the director’s native Occitanie hide a multitude of sins.
In cinemas from Friday, March 28th
