Returning to Saint-Martial for his late boss's funeral, Jérémie's stay with widow Martine becomes entangled in a disappearance, a threatening neighbor, and an abbot's shady intentions.

Winner of the Prix Louis-Delluc for Best French Film of 2024 and and hailed as the ‘Best Film of the Year' by Les Cahiers du cinéma.

The Garden Cinema View:

Alain Guiraudie's (Stranger By The Lake) films blend mischievous queer narratives with an almost Chabrolian attraction to deviance and macabre humour. Misericordia is perhaps his most enigmatic film to date – albeit one that has received rapturous acclaim in France. And perhaps this is, in part, due to the immediate ‘Frenchness’ of the setting. The superbly talented cinematographer Claire Mathon (Atlantics, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Spencer, Saint Omer, Guiraudie’s own Stranger by the Lake) captures the Occitanian location in probing mid-shots and steady-cam takes which often keep action and characters at a slight distance. The imposing stone walls and ever shuttered windows imbue the village with a sense of desertion; something is trapped inside.

This is a ‘cuckoo-in-the-nest’ narrative which neither moves into the pure genre thrills of The Talented Mr Ripley or the more transcendental/political sphere of Passolini’s Teorema. Rather, this quiet world turns out to be a seething nest of repressed desire, violence, and (ultimately quite funny) amorality.    

Cast:
Félix Kysyl, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, David Ayala