A long, quiet road slicesthrough the French countryside. There’s no dialogue, no sounds from the engine, just the ambient hum of Marc Verdaguer’s slightly menacing score. We follow this road the way we follow a thought, one that begins benignly but deepens into something harder, darker, and more difficult to name. This is how the new filmMisericordiabegins — like a memory you didn’t expect to revisit.
Alain Guiraudie’sMisericordiais a film about returning, not just to a place, but to buried feelings, to unresolved tensions, to the unspeakable acts we commit in the name of tenderness. As in his earlier works (Stranger by the Lake,Nobody’s Hero), Guiraudie continues to traffic in exquisitely unsettling narratives, films that are sexually charged, morally murky, and tonally ambidextrous, where eroticism and violence unfold with disarming nonchalance.Misericordiais no exception. It’s a pastoral thriller where intimacy and transgression often look like the same thing.
Murder First as Mystery, Then as Farce
Misericordia
Misericordia follows Jérémie as he returns to his hometown for a friend’s funeral. Amidst a backdrop of unspoken tensions and suspicion, he becomes entangled in local rumors and faces a police investigation after committing an irreversible act.
Set in the autumnal rustic landscape of Saint-Martial in Occitanie,Misericordiais less a murder mystery than a slow-blooming parable about desire, guilt, and complicity. Jérémie (played with beguiling opacity by newcomer Félix Kysyl)returns to his hometownfor the funeral of his former boss, Jean-Pierre, a man whose presence still lingers in the bakery and in Jérémie’s longings. He stays with the widow, Martine (a radiant, world-weary Catherine Frot), and her grown son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a man of simmering resentment and unstable masculinity.
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At first, Jérémie’s return seems harmless, a gesture of respect, of unfinished mourning.But Guiraudie ever so gradually reveals that Jérémie is not just visiting — he’s nesting. And the more he embeds himself into the rhythms of Martine’s grief and the fabric of the village, the more unsettled Vincent becomes.
The tension between Vincent and Jérémie inMisericordiaunfolds with the discomfort of a domestic farce played at the pitch of a thriller. A potential game of Yahtzee turns into a physical scuffle. An early kiss — ostensibly just a traditional French greeting — lingers just a moment too long, hinting at a shared history never fully spoken aloud. Vincent is always in blue, always on edge, like a character who knows he’s in someone else’s story.
Desire Without Center, Violence Without Warning
Guiraudie’s brilliance lies in his refusal to announce genre. Sexuality is present but unstated. Violence is sudden and matter-of-fact. When the fatal fight between Jérémie and Vincent arrives, it feels at once inevitable and absurdly mundane. The camera neither sensationalizes nor moralizes; it simply observes, as if to say, “These things happen.”
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After Vincent’s death, Jérémie buries the body and returns to the village with the same soft gaze and obliging politeness. But now, the world looks different. Guilt moves slowly through the town like fog. The only person who suspects him (and perhaps knows everything) is the village priest. Jacques Develay plays the priest with a disarming buoyancy, so cheerful it’s eerie.When he offers Jérémie an alibi in exchange for affection, it’s unclear whether he’s bartering for the body or the soul, or if, in Guiraudie’s world, there’s any distinction between the two.
The small-town dynamics inMisericordiaare both claustrophobic and comic. There’s a moment when two bumbling police officers interrogate townsfolk with the absurd rhythm of a Marx Brothers routine. Guiraudie leans into the farcical here, using tonal whiplash to destabilize our expectations. Is this a drama? A satire? A parable? Yes, and also: none of the above.
The film’s spiritual undertow is strongest in the figure of the priest, who quietly philosophizes about a coming collapse of civilization and the emptiness of future cemeteries. He is either mad, wise, or both. In the same breath, he can bless a body and cover up a crime. That contradiction, the film suggests, is at the core of faith — and of love.
A Landscape of Murky Morality
Claire Mathon’s cinematography is unflinching, painterly yet stripped of romance. She frames characters at a distance, letting the environment swallow them. Jerémie and Martine often blend into the earth-toned palette of their surroundings, except for Martine’s bright red sweater, which makes her visually pop in the frame and draws out the caramel in her eyes. The red, a complementary contrast to Vincent’s sharp blues, becomes its own kind of visual motif, a marker of warmth, openness, and emotional vibrancy against his cold, controlling energy. Vincent’s presence, always cloaked in blue, registers as resistance, disruption, a symbol of the tension he cannot contain.
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There’s a disturbing tenderness in the way Jérémie navigates his new life. He wears the dead man’s pajamas. He sleeps next to Martine, who tells him it’s too soon to snuggle. And yet, they hold hands. Grief has softened all boundaries. The scene is both tender and grotesque, a microcosm of the film’s unsettling emotional register.
Unlikefilms that work overtime to declare their queerness,Misericordiasimply exists within it. It queers genre by making eroticism an ambient possibility rather than a plot point. We don’t need to know the exact nature of Jérémie’s relationship with Jean-Pierre, or with Vincent, or with Walter, the man he briefly seduces while wearing his shirt. These interactions are not part of a clear identity arc (and the film sufferes from the elusive vagueness of its characters); rather, they are moments of need, of longing, of power. In this way,Misericordiashares thematic DNA with films like Albert Serra’sPacifiction(Serra is credited as executive producer), where action becomes subtext, and desire moves like vapor.
‘Misericordia’ Is a Pastoral Noir of the Flesh and Soul
Guiraudie seems less interested in justice than in what people will live with. No one in the town believes Jérémie is innocent — not Martine, not the police, not Walter. But they all choose to live in that shared fiction because perhaps denial is easier than disruption. By the time Jérémie is back in the bakery, baking bread and slipping fully into the role of the man he once worked for (and perhaps loved), it’s not a triumph. It’s a quiet horror. We are watching a man live out a dream that became real through murder, enabled by religion, and coated in a thick, yeasty nostalgia.
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Misericordiapremiered in the Cannes Premiere section at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, where itcompeted for the Queer Palm. It went on to win the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize for Best Film (2024),solidifying its place among theyear’s most critically regarded French films. At the 28th Fantasia International Film Festival, Alain Guiraudie received the Directors Guild of Canada Award forBest Direction in a Canadian Film, and the film garnered eight nominations at the 50th César Awards, though it ultimately went home empty-handed. Despite the César shutout, the film’s presence across major international festivals and juried categories affirms its stylistic ambition and cultural resonance.
“Death is not an end; it is simply a passageway,” the priest says. And that may be the film’s thesis. In Misericordia, death is just another door — a portal to inheritance, to intimacy, to impersonation, to something not unlike love, but not quite it either. Guiraudie doesn’t ask us to condemn Jérémie. He asks us to sit with the fact that, in the right context, his actions almost make sense. That might be the most disturbing part of all.From Sideshow and Janus Films,Misericordiais now in theaters nationally;find showtimes and buy tickets here. It is screening atFilm at Lincoln Centerin New York, and there’s a Q&A with the director tonight, March 21. A retrospective of Alain Guiraudie’s films isstreaming on The Criterion Collection here.
