This article appeared in the March 21, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024)

Morels sprout in the forests of France from late winter through spring. These mushrooms are rare and elusive to foragers; prized by chefs for their rich, earthy flavor; and toxic if eaten raw or undercooked. They are finicky specimens that thrive in the moist, well-drained soil of lightly wooded areas. Despite the honeycombed ridges that characterize their caps, they look more or less like dicks.

It is thus rather strange that Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), the central figure in the mysteries of Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, should find such a bounty of them growing in one very specific spot in the autumnal forests he frequents on his daily perambulations around the village of Saint-Martial in southern France. Strange, too, what else sprouts in the woods: no sooner has Jérémie collected his mushrooms than he turns to face a police officer (Sébastien Faglain) who has seemingly appeared spontaneously to investigate the recent disappearance of a villager. Interrogating Jérémie on his whereabouts the previous night, the gendarme concludes his probe by noting the unprecedented timing of morels appearing in the fall—at which point, in an even more improbable feat of timing, the town priest (Jacques Develay) materializes to explain that Jérémie, nervously clutching his bag of phallic fungi, must be held entirely above suspicion. For, the priest blatantly lies, this fine young man spent an amorous night in his arms.

This scene, occurring late in the sly, mischievous plot of Misericordia, exemplifies the stratagems put to marvelous effect in the latest provocation by writer-director Guiraudie. It is far from the only instance, in a movie predicated on theatrical entrances and fanciful interventions, where the priest’s most divine function is to serve as a narrative deus ex machina. At once steeped in suspense and drop-dead funny, Misericordia is a sex comedy infused with thriller elements (or perhaps vice versa). Working with a small ensemble, Guiraudie sets up a modest premise, and then allows its complexities to ramify with bemused equanimity.

The film’s blatant theatrics could easily be transposed to the stage, and might be summarized in the form of a cast description:

Jérémie: An enigmatic young man who returns from Toulouse to the village where he once apprenticed with the town’s baker, recently deceased.

Martine (Catherine Frot): The baker’s widow, who invites Jérémie to stay with her for a few days.

Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand): Martine’s hot-tempered son and a childhood friend of Jérémie’s.

Walter (David Ayala): A village farmer, currently unemployed and rather shabby.

The Priest: Possesses idiosyncratic beliefs and a potent sex drive.

The Gendarme: Unflappable. Prone to ethically questionable methods of investigation.

Over the course of Misericordia, a movie rife with loaded glances and subtle insinuations, these half-dozen players enact their designated roles in a scenario that charges every relation with a twist. Jérémie, who is the process of breaking up with his girlfriend, was once in love with the now-dead baker. Martine, quite at peace with this fact, further wonders if Jérémie has slept with Vincent, who for his part grows increasingly furious over his suspicions—lacking all evidence—that Jérémie wants to sleep with his mother. Meanwhile, chugging pastis in his ramshackle apartment, Walter variously hosts Vincent and Jérémie, the latter of whom, after a drink or two, makes a pass at the disheveled farmer, who rebuffs his advances. As these village frissons build, someone goes missing. Enter the gendarme, alongside the increasingly erratic, scene-stealing priest.

“Misericordia” is Latin for “mercy,” and the film is not without its musings on guilt, forgiveness, compassion, and redemption. Guiraudie, however, is less a filmmaker of the soul than of the body. His best-known work remains Stranger by the Lake (2013), an erotic, sinister puzzle set at a gay cruising ground, and while Misericordia—anointed the best film of 2024 by Cahiers du cinéma and nominated for multiple César awards—reprises some of the material (lust, landscapes, murder) and methods (repetition, diagrammatic precision) of his earlier triumph, its mysteries are better clarified in light of some of the lesser-known entries in his filmography.

The King of Escape (2009) concerns a pudgy, 43-year-old gay man who strikes up an affair with a 16-year-old girl and goes on the lam from various authorities. Meanwhile, half the middle-aged and elderly men in town (including the detective on the case) are fucking each other in the woods, horned up on a mysterious root with a popper/Viagra effect—a milieu to which the main character returns after deciding straight life with a teenager is not really his deal. All of this would have caused a major scandal were it made by an American, but, in the context of French auteurism, amounts to a minor entry in an oeuvre that would proceed to explore even more outlandish erotic premises and metamorphic sexuality.

In Staying Vertical (2016), an itinerant screenwriter has an affair with a rural woman and fathers her child, while simultaneously entering various homoerotic situations—and at least one butthole. The shape-shifting plot is impossible to anticipate; the protagonist’s motives are utterly opaque, and the movie ends on a daftly allegorical note involving a pack of wolves. Even more perplexing in its random sexuality and narrative whimsies, Nobody’s Hero (2022) triangulates a bourgeois normie, the married sex worker he becomes infatuated with, and an Arab teenager into a heady burlesque of French social and political mores. The movie starts crazy, gets progressively crazier, and culminates in a glorious paroxysm of nonsense. Sexual identity is as volatile as the ludicrous plot; a character who, in a key moment of disclosure, is identified as gay will later be seen eating out a woman with tremendous gusto. The movie could have been called Every Hole Is a Goal.

Compared to these broader, much weirder entries in Guiraudie’s oeuvre, the meticulously orchestrated gay-male milieu of Stranger by the Lake is an anomaly—the straightest film he’s made. The feat of Misericordia is to harness that film’s formal command to the zany impulses of his other works. Guiraudie’s latest clarifies and perfects a farcical logic of the social that underpins all his filmmaking, characterized by spontaneous relationality, capricious alliances and ephemeral connections, and sexuality as an impromptu drive rather than a fixed identity. Guiraudie is often labeled a queer director, but while it’s true that his movies feature same-sex relations, their queerness evokes the other, older sense of the term: aberrant, unusual, peculiar, suspicious.

The key enigma in Misericordia is not who did what to whom, but rather why Jérémie sends everyone into such a tizzy. He arrives in town like an aging twink reincarnation of the Mustache Daddy who deranges the bucolic reverie of Stranger by the Lake. Like most Guiraudie protagonists, Jérémie is inscrutable by design, a pattern of behaviors unlinked to any clear psychological, sexual, or historical profile. And what of Guiraudie’s motives? Sex is comedy, comedy is timing, and time, in the wayward maneuvers of Misericordia, is full of surprises.

Nathan Lee is an assistant professor of film at Hollins University, and a longtime contributor to Film Comment.