MISERICORDIA - Mark Reviews Movies

Misericorida, Sideshow / Janus Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 20, 2025

Writer/director Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia is ostensibly a thriller, about a young man who returns to his hometown and gets into—to put it mildly—a bit of trouble. As odd as it may sound, the movie is also—and in a way that's difficult to reconcile with the stark look and feel of the story—a kind of sex comedy at its core.

Both of those ideas revolve around Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), the aforementioned man trying to come home again. He has returned to the sleepy little town of Saint-Martial after the death of an old boss, who gave Jérémie his first job and taught him a trade that he still practices. Well, he's a baker who works at an industrial bakery in a nearby city, but if the opportunity ever arises, he could work at or even run a little shop in some sleepy little town where people still care about buying bread baked that very morning.

Such an opportunity, of course, has arisen in Saint-Martial after the death of the local baker to a year-long disease. The man has left behind a bakery that hasn't been in operation for about as long as the baker's last year of life, a wife named Martine (Catherine Frot), and the couple's adult son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who lives in a neighboring city with his wife and son. Martine welcomes Jérémie into her home with open arms, and she tells her husband's mentee that he should take Vincent's childhood bedroom.

That's the first of several slights that Vincent perceives Jérémie committing against him. Eventually, the returning baker stays longer under Martine's roof, as he contemplates taking over his former boss' business and seeks some guidance from local shopkeeper Walter (David Ayala), one of Vincent's closest friends from childhood. All of this becomes too much for Vincent to take—this now-outsider getting close to his friend, devising a way to insert himself into his family's legacy, and, in Vincent mind's, trying to seduce his grieving mother for reasons that probably make sense only in the son's mind.

Here's the jokey part of it all, essentially. Jérémie is gay, and the main reason he has come home for his boss' funeral is because he held an unrequited and unspoken love for the man the entire time they knew each other. Everything Vincent presumes is wrong. If Jérémie wants to take over the bakery, it's only to honor the man he loved. If Jérémie talks to Walter, it is legitimately about business or, perhaps, because he suspects the store owner might also be hiding his own sexuality. If Jérémie spends time with Martine, it's because they both understand losing someone they loved—certainly not because he wants to have sex with the man's widow.

It's all a series of big misunderstandings that lead Vincent to become paranoid about and increasingly aggressive toward Jérémie. Early into the returning baker's visit, the two men play-wrestle in the woods, where people regularly look for mushrooms that grow on the forest floor, but as the tension mounts between them, the subsequent fights stop being play.

One day, Vincent picks up Jérémie walking on the side the road, drives him out to a remote part of the forest, and is set on making his point of wanting him gone clear. Instead, Jérémie gets the upper hand and murders his defenseless opponent.

In old-fashioned thriller fashion, the rest of the story, obviously, is about Jérémie trying to convince everyone that Vincent has left town, evade suspicion, and make sure no one knows the truth of what happened in the forest. In theory, this should be incredibly difficult, because Jérémie isn't too skilled of a liar, the few people who knew about his relationship with Vincent also know that it was contentious on both side, and his efforts to cover up the murder are so predictable that, when the police do arrive to start investigating Vincent's disappearance, they lay out what a killer would have done. It's exactly what Jérémie did.

The other, more significant gag to the story, then, is that Jérémie keeps succeeding in his lies and deceptions, even as they're repeatedly picked apart by several people. The reason for that is simple: He has some beguiled everyone of note here, because all of them love him, want to sleep with him, or wouldn't complain if the chance to have sex with him arose.

That list, by the way, includes Martine, who walks in on Jérémie while he showers in a moment of ordinary intimacy, and Walter, whom Jérémie gropes after a drink and who later tells the young man he's not opposed to the notion, and even the local priest Fr. Philippe (Jacques Develay). The pastor comes up with a rather convoluted way to justify why his infatuation with Jérémie supersedes any moral or legal considerations when it comes to murder.

All of this underlying humor is played between the lines of Guiraudie's movie, which makes it intriguingly subversive as a matter of philosophy, thorny as a study of human emotions and connections, and ironic as a look at how people can contort notions of morality and justice to fit their own needs and desires. What Misericordia is not, however, is a convincing merging of these ideas with the plotting of a bluntly made thriller that, as a result, just becomes sillier as it progresses.

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