Critics reviews

One would expect from the opening scene or two that Misericordia will remain a steadfast drama. Yet fairly quickly, it pivots into an oddball comedy of sorts... In a film so full of surprises, the first act being a comedy of bending social norms morphs into two final acts full of gripping thrills.

If Misericordia thus stands not just as a novel development of Hitchcock but also as a major film in Guiraudie’s oeuvre, it is because it 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). 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.

While the film’s restrained quality relative to Guiraudie’s earlier work doesn’t necessarily make its ideas any less troubling or provocative, he’s also rarely played it safer in narrative and aesthetic terms than he does here.

There are several points within “Miséricorde” where one wishes for a narrative that had a stronger determination to examine these characters with a little more forceful momentum. The stagnant pacing will often slow down the overall engagement, which can also contribute to some lackluster characterization. What is noteworthy is how the filmmaking does a credible job of establishing a disturbing setting that slowly acknowledges the riveting relationships on display.

Misericordie is his strongest work since Stranger, abandoning his typical pansexual couplings and trying to combat viewer expectations with near-chastity.

Yet, for all its morbid undertones and philosophical ruminations, Misericordia is neither a dirge nor a lofty symposium. Strange as it may be to say for a story that begins with a burial and then shatters after a heinous death, this is a supremely and surprisingly funny film, where humor gradually accrues a subversiveness not unlike desire’s own.

In the director’s best work, Guiraudie’s trademark is to infuse genre dalliances with mordant wit and a deliciously peculiar, defiant queerness. And while it may initially appear to be straightforward — and while it thankfully avoids the wild tonal swings of muddy tragicomedy “Staying Vertical” (2016) and rather baffling terrorism sex-farce “Nobody’s Hero” (2022) — nobody could ever accuse this increasingly twisted psychodrama of playing it straight.

ith “Miséricorde” (“Misericordia”)... he has crafted another elegantly haunting dissection of the power dynamics shaping queer sexuality, this time in the form of an fantastically tender, alluring, and peculiar small-town tale of murder, desire, and repression.

More so than Stranger by the Lake, Misericordia articulates the selfish (or maybe not) reasons people love from afar or choose to be accessories and protect criminals, though it’s far less tragic and heartbreaking – there isn’t a gay man further isolated by age and portliness who is actively seeking death by luring the killer.

Misericordia... initially seems to promise a low-key, straight-down-the-line French rural melodrama. But then it takes a few confounding thriller detours before showing its hand as a philosophical (and even somewhat theological) disquisition on guilt, redemption and the necessity of transgression in a messed-up world.

Narratively, this is perhaps Guiraudie’s most conventional film, yet not less interesting or enlightening for that. It is of a piece with the rest of his filmography, which has always embraced aberrations and perversions as necessary and ennobling aspects of the human experience.

Like for his other films — eight features and nearly as many shorts — the director creates his own unique tone, combining stark naturalistic performances reminiscent of Robert Bresson with the macabre humor and underlying suspense of Hitchcock.