Reviewed on November 10th at the 2024 Cork International Film Festival – World Tour Section. 102 Mins
Cast: Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frost, Jacques Develay, Jean-Baptiste Durand, David Ayala
Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama
Director: Alain Guiraudie
In Irish Cinemas: 28th March 2025
Alain Guiraudie’s latest queer noir, Misericordia, is a brilliantly twisted, darkly comic exploration of unfulfilled desires and their grotesque manifestations in adulthood. The film opens with a long, winding drive—an almost serpentine journey that sets the tone for a narrative filled with moral ambiguity and sexual tension—and concludes with an unexpected intimacy: a man and a woman, neither related nor married, lying in bed as the light is switched off.
Guiraudie, best known for Stranger by the Lake—a modern queer classic that Cahiers du Cinéma named the best film of 2013 (an honour they also bestowed upon Misericordia in 2023)—once again collaborates with cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) to craft a bleakly funny tragicomedy. The film examines how adolescent longing, left unchecked and unprocessed, can fester and warp into something both absurd and dangerous.
While Stranger by the Lake was a stark, erotic murder mystery about obsession in a secluded gay cruising spot, Misericordia approaches crime with a different tone—treating it as an almost inevitable outgrowth of human entanglements. At the centre of it all is Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a man whose unhealthy attachments have dictated much of his life. He returns to the small, insular town of Saint-Martial following the death of his former boss—a man he admired to an unsettling degree. Grieving in his peculiar way, Jérémie lingers over old photographs, particularly one of the deceased in a tight Speedo, and fixates on the widow, Martine (French cinema legend Catherine Trot). His motives remain elusive: Does he want to seduce her? Taunt her? Replace her lost son? Or perhaps become him?
Guiraudie, a novelist and filmmaker, refuses to define Jérémie’s intentions or identity. Kysyl’s casting is a stroke of genius—his face and body oscillate between youthful naivety and world-weariness, making him seem unstuck in age and purpose. His sexuality, too, is left purposefully undefined, morphing and infecting those around him like spores from a poisonous mushroom.
Jérémie’s return to Saint-Martial rekindles a fraught friendship with his childhood best friend, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who also happens to be Martine’s son. Their relationship is charged—part sibling rivalry, part power struggle, laced with a homoerotic tension that neither fully acknowledges. As they roughhouse in the woods like feral cousins, their bond teeters between nostalgia and something more dangerous. Meanwhile, another local, the towering, alcoholic Walter (David Ayala), finds himself simultaneously repulsed by and drawn to Jérémie’s advances.
When Jérémie and Vincent’s increasingly volatile connection takes a deadly turn, Jérémie seeks shelter with a local priest (Jacques Develay), a figure who offers him both spiritual counsel and a place to hide—one that comes with a warm bed and its implications. The beds are numerous. Jérémie moves between them not just for comfort or pleasure but as a means of survival, slipping through sheets as he evades the police, who suspect him of murder.
Guiraudie’s Misericordia has drawn comparisons to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, in which Terence Stamp’s enigmatic visitor disrupts a bourgeois family’s fragile equilibrium through a mix of spiritual transcendence and carnal temptation. Jérémie’s presence in Saint-Martial is similarly destabilising, shaking loose the town’s hidden desires and repressed urges. One particularly unforgettable scene finds the priest struggling with a conspicuously large erection—an image at once absurd and revealing, exposing the body’s betrayal of a mind that has tried and failed to deny its hunger.
Ultimately, Misericordia is a film about the inescapability of desire and its often-destructive consequences. Guiraudie remains one of cinema’s most incisive chroniclers of male longing, mapping its absurd, erotic, and sometimes lethal fallout with sharp wit and an unflinching gaze. While this film may not land with the same transgressive shock as Stranger by the Lake, which famously combined unsimulated sex with a queer take on the crime thriller, Misericordia offers something just as potent. This seductive, sinister warmth lingers long after the final frame. Even in its most outrageous moments, the film maintains a self-aware smirk, sharing a knowing, conspiratorial grin with its audience.
The title, Miséricorde, translates to “mercy” in English, and mercy, in many forms, is what the film ultimately extends—to its characters, its protagonist, and even the audience. Guiraudie, ever the provocateur, understands that even in our darkest, most misguided moments, there is something to be forgiven. What a miracle of a movie.
Overall: 7/10
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