The vitality of classic formats such as thrillers and mysteries comes not from their nostalgic reminders of old movies but from their power to inspire and embody new ideas and stylistic advances. In this regard, the French director Alain Guiraudie is a figure of paradox, because he’s at his most complex when working with taut and traditional frameworks. The looser his storytelling, the more literally he sticks to it; the tighter his dramatic mainspring, the further it launches him in concepts and forms, aesthetics and symbols. That’s why his new film, “Misericordia”—like his 2014 thriller “Stranger by the Lake”—is an exceptional experience. (It was screened at the New York Film Festival last fall and is being released this Friday.) “Misericordia” is, fundamentally, a snappy and satisfying entertainment, a thriller that thrills. The plot is tight yet full of surprises (which I’ll avoid revealing); the story is logical yet wide-ranging, and it pings and sparks with nuances of behavior and character, with psychological implications and piquant observations. Its thrills owe as much to its aesthetic as to its story.
Set in late 2023, “Misericordia” is a classic tale of a prodigal’s return to a troubled home. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a man of around thirty, arrives in the village where he grew up, having been away for ten years. He has come for the funeral of his mentor, a baker named Jean-Pierre (Serge Richard), who died at the age of sixty-two. The baker’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), offers to put him up in the bedroom of the couple’s son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), an old friend of Jérémie’s who still lives nearby, now married with a child. Once back, Jérémie can’t bear to leave, and Vincent, resentful of the intruder in his mother’s house, tries to bully him out. He even accuses Jérémie of wanting to sleep with her. Unbeknownst to him, Jérémie (who mentions an ex-girlfriend) is sexually interested in men; what’s more, he was in love with Jean-Pierre, and, indeed, still is. Then Vincent disappears, and Jérémie finds himself at the center of a police investigation and being eyed suspiciously by the locals, including a dour, snooping priest (Jacques Develay); a stolid, schlubby ex-farmer named Walter (David Ayala); and Vincent’s wife, Annie (Tatiana Spivakova). Meanwhile, Martine, grieving and distraught, is determined to get to the bottom of things and finds that having Jérémie under her roof is useful.
The setup of a disappearance, circumstantial evidence, love beyond death, and religious connections (such as a stunning scene in a confessional) has Hitchcockian overtones. Guiraudie amplifies these to screeching intensity by way of yet another Hitchcockian element—sex—about which Guiraudie is far more explicit than Hitchcock could be, given the constraints of his time. Guiraudie, who is gay and grew up in a farming family, has made a career tracing currents of desire surging through rural France—in particular, the prevalence of queer life in tradition-bound places. Another near-constant in Guiraudie’s films is sexual longing that bridges age gaps, a classic cinematic trope that’s usually left unaddressed but which Guiraudie persistently brings to the fore, as in his first great film, the featurette “That Old Dream That Moves” (2001) and in “Stranger by the Lake,” which won him an award at Cannes. (Both of these movies are streaming on the Criterion Channel.)
The motor of “Misericordia” is the erotic bond that pulls Jérémie back to the village. He comes not merely to pay his respects but to breathe Jean-Pierre’s air, to be in the presence of his body one last time, to reënter his aura, to luxuriate in his memory and his personal memorabilia—even, thanks to Martine’s generosity, to wear his clothing. (Donning the dead man’s pants and sweater, Jérémie doesn’t hesitate to ask for his underwear and socks, too.) Vincent is none too thrilled. Moreover, Martine offers Jérémie a more enduring and practical bond with her late husband: to take over his bakery, which is currently shuttered. Having blown into town as a returned prodigal, Jérémie seems to be on his way to becoming a surrogate son. He fits another cinematic archetype, too: the man from nowhere. It’s suggested he’s been living in Toulouse, and there’s his mention of an ex-girlfriend, but he reveals so little else about his life that the details could be convenient patchwork fictions. It’s as if his return has blanked out the intervening decade, his ongoing life voided to make room for what’s left of the past and what can be reconjured.
Guiraudie is a filmmaker of locale—both its poet and its analyst. The village to which Jérémie returns is called Saint-Martial, but the film was mostly shot in and around a number of villages close to where Guiraudie grew up, in the Aveyron department of southern France. Saint-Martial comes to life with a startling, physical, sharply textured immediacy, from its narrow streets and rugged buildings to the labyrinthine expanses and towering heights of the nearby woods. Much of the action takes place outdoors, as in those very woods, where Jérémie and other villagers wander in search of wild mushrooms, and in the scruffy land separating the village’s houses and barns that serve as hiding places and vantage points for low-tech but high-stakes surveillance—whether of investigative or erotic import. The landscape itself—the ground, thick with fallen leaves and wet with rain, and the bright peaks that provide alluring vistas—becomes an important character in the twists and turns of the story.
The geographical factor is not a matter of mere scenery but is continuous with Guiraudie’s keenly discerning vision of rural society: the loam of relationships among deeply intertwined families, the cherished rituals of daily life, the settled hierarchies of tradition and authority, the economic discontinuities of local farming in a technological age. Jérémie’s return, as if to reclaim his place in the community, holds the promise of filling a vacancy in the life of the village. (There are shades of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” in how neatly the new arrival fits into the space formally occupied by the handsome, robust Jean-Pierre, whose clothing fits Jérémie just about perfectly.) He instead proves to be an agent of disruption, not least by bringing to the surface sexual latencies that, lying dormant, seemingly held the village under a pall. His erotic energy jolts the community from its torpor.
For all its thematic intricacy and insights, “Misericordia” is a thriller both in its dramatic construction and in its artistry. Guiraudie is as masterful a constructor of images as of plots, equally attuned to visual ideas and civic ones. One moment in “Misericordia” practically lifted me from my seat with astonishment, not only at the twist it sets up but also at the aesthetic delight that it embodies. No spoilers, but it involves a cut from Jérémie in bed at four in the morning to Vincent pulling up to the house at the wheel of his car. The flash of ingenuity that this cut represents becomes clear only in retrospect, when, soon after, a related plot mechanism snaps like a mousetrap. The resulting realizations also reveal the wide range of cinematic invention provoking them. First, there’s the plot point itself; then there are the directorial decisions on location to create the images and imbue them with rich mood via composition, light, pace, expression, and gesture; there’s the characters’ psychological vectors that the twist suggests and that the audiovisual specifics lay bare. Only then does the editing emerge as both the logical result and the explosive convergence of the sequence’s vast spectrum of inspiration and imagination. ♦
