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.
Screened as part of 2025
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