'Best Film of the Year'
Cahiers du Cinéma
★★★★★
"A deadpan comedy-thriller from the director of 'Stranger by the Lake'...It is a sly deadpan social comedy that considers mercy (misericordia in Latin) as an alternative response to a crime like murder."
An actor who inspires viewers' empathy, Kysyl has the boyishness of English actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster, while his disarming mix of plausibility and deviousness recalls John Hurt. Whatever horrible things are done by Jérémie - a Tom Ripley of the French woods - we're with him all the way."
Graham Fuller, The Arts Desk
★★★★ "...this intriguingly tricky drama has a perverse appeal...Guiraudie seeds Misericordia with needling sexual tension and latent savagery through an ominous, skin-prickling score by Marc Vergaguer and Claire Mathon's snaking, shifty camerawork."
Wendy Ide, The Observer
★★★★ "There is refreshing humour in the absurdity of some of the developments. After an act that changes the trajectory of the film, characteristics of a subdued thriller à la Patricia Highsmith emerge, not focused on the "who" or "why" but the "will they get away with it?"
Selina Sondermann, The Upcoming
★★★★ "..at once a crime thriller, a philosophical musing on guilt and redemption, and a deadpan rural bedroom farce.
Misericordia plays like a languid, strangely claustrophobic absurdist joke, but at its heart are a moral seriousness and sly moral subversion, lightly pitched.
As long as you're not allergic to mushrooms - or clerical indiscretions - Misericordia is a very genial offering from a genial auteur."
Jonathan Romney, The Financial Times
★★★★ "What on earth do people want in Alain Guiraudie's latest pitch-black murder-comedy? The director of Stranger by the Lake returns to the deadpan, sexually unstable working-class environs that have shaped many of his previous films with this pleasingly confounding tale of displaced characters and desires. We know whodunit in this Hitchcockian murder-comedy. But what’s everyone else up to? This heavily decorated French film offers a heady and murky marriage of enigmatic motivations, sexual and otherwise."
Tara Brady, The Irish Times
★★★★ "...both black comedy and even darker thrills, delivering a devilishly queer take on a Gallic storytelling staple. It's as dark a scenario as they come, but Guiraudie mines humour through the growing absurdism of it all."
Eric Hillis, The Movie Waffler
★★★★ "Queer desire circulates among the various characters...These feelings of sexual yearning, which in some cases transgress taboos and social conventions, are repressed or displaced or even aggressively resisted. Moral and philosophical issues are raised around notions of crime and punishment."
Thomas Dawson, Little White Lies
★★★★"...strangely brilliant performances...takes you close up and personal to follow every lie, every truth and every desire. For such a perverse story it is strikingly earthy and convincing, and for sure a fascinating exploration of the nature of mercy. Uncomfortable, but masterful."
Angus Reid, Morning Star
★★★★
"Chilling...original cinema. The sheer wierdness of the human condition drives the plot."
Dan Carrier, Camden New Journal
"Walk on the Wild Side. A real tonic for anyone who'd feared the cinema had long since lost the elements of mystery, grace and surprise. Sometimes it pays to wander off the beaten track."
Allan Hunter, Cinesthesiac
"It is autumn, and the wooded Aveyron landscape of south-east France is beautifully portrayed. If these villagers simply feel the way they do, how can a single individual be blamed once the repercussions of their entangled emotions play out? What good would a punishment such as imprisonment do anyway? And when do mercy and acceptance disguise a new desire for revenge or control?
Isabelle Grey, The Tablet
"Using the structure of an absurdist thriller spiced with gallows humour, the director sets before us a challenge akin to Deuteronomy 30:15: life and prosperity or death and destruction."
Stephen Brown, Church Times
"Sexual repression and religious hypocrisy are hardly new topics in French cinema, but Guiraudie puts a new spin on them, as he up-ends Pasolini's scenario in Teorema (1968) by having the mysterious intruder become the casualty rather than the provocateur."
David Parkinson, Parky at the Pictures
"The Best Films to See This March"
"A darkly comic thriller...think Tom Ripley with clergymen sporting giant boners."
Alex Denney, AnOther magazine
"A film bursting with sex: physical desires and romantic intentions drive the storyline, dominate the dialogue..."
Read the full interview with Alain Guiraudie in the 'Links' folder on the film page.
Nick Chen, Dazed
"...absorbingly absurdist. It’s got its own rhythm. If Guiraudie isn’t mocking the way we’ve been trained to receive stories, films, people, then he’s at least disrupting the usual patterns. Retraining us to see anew, to suspend expectation and abandon comfort, the way that John Waters and Mike Leigh, Aki Kaurismaki, Hal Hartley and the other oddball live-action cartoonists have. It’s risky, but something thrilling and often true usually comes of it. Guiraudie presents life at its basest and gamiest."
Wesley Morris, The New York Times
"What a miracle of a movie."
Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire
'There's something Hitchcockian in the water: in the sustained tension of the extended sequence that patiently tracks the before, during and after of the plot's central murder, further implicating us at each stage; but also in Guiraudie's eye for mordant humour. With its consistent attention to contingent absurdities, the film could be classed as a comedy. Mercy it turns out, is a messy business.'
Ben Walters, Sight & Sound
"Like most Guiraudie protagonists, Jérémie is inscrutable by design, a pattern of behaviours 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, Film Comment
"His new film, “Misericordia”—like his 2014 thriller “Stranger by the Lake”—is an exceptional experience. “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 behaviour and character, with psychological implications and piquant observations. Its thrills owe as much to its aesthetic as to its story."
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"Guiraudie launches Jérémie down the street like an inscrutable chaos agent in rumpled denim, tensely wrestling in the woods with Vincent and flirting with Walter (David Ayala), a slovenly layabout who doesn’t mind drinking with company. Every scene brings another layer to Kysyl’s performance, by turns curious, lonely and aggressive.
Jérémie is inserting himself where he doesn’t belong — you feel it before you see it. Guiraudie, best known for his 2013 erotic mystery “Stranger by the Lake,” has never chiseled his images with such Chabrolian tautness as he does here. A filmmaker with a queer focus, he writes characters that are especially liberated from morality, making them dimensional but also dangerous."
Joshua Rothkopf, The Los Angeles Times
"We watch as Jérémie tumbles from one potentially compromising interaction to the next and all the while remain focused on noir-ish plot twists and naturalistic, snappy dialogue which slowly unravels the movie’s cynical, metaphysical, earthy, and often dryly hilarious sensibility. It’s not a hard movie to follow or fall for, as fans of Guiraudie’s earlier movies already know. He commands our attention even when his characters are either too ridiculous or too petty to be taken seriously. Each new scene in “Misericordia” upends viewers’ expectations, and Guiraudie never lets up long enough for you to wonder if maybe he’s messing with you, too."
Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com
"What gives this thriller a decided edge — what makes it essentially French— is the suave, confident, sophisticated unravelling of events."
Nathaniel Bell, Village Voice
"Misericordia" is beguillingly queer. Set in a small town where being gay could mean getting shot, Jérémie doesn't seem to worry all that much. And the priest is even more shameless in pursuing his carnal desires. Guiraudie loves to challenge conventional notions of love, sex, longing, guilt, forgiveness, and shame, and he does so in his own original and bracing manner.'
The best queer-themed NYFF Main Slate FIlm, nor surprisingly, was from the daring and gifted French auteur Alain Guiraudie, who made one of the best films of the last 20 years, "Stranger By the Lake." Once again he tapped into his neo-Hitchcockian, devilishly satiric style with his latest work."
Frank J. Avela, The Edge
"A masterpiece! Feels like a perverse fable." Radu Jude
'An unparalleled triumph. Melds wit and suspense like no other.' Payal Kapadia
'Stands with works by Buñuel and Renoir as the most effortlessly subversive film in the history of cinema.' Miguel Gomes
'With his quirky humour Alain Guiraudie succeeds in making us feel emotions we might be scared to feel.' Claire Denis
'Absolutely great. Reminded me of the best of Chabrol and Buñuel.' Ari Aster
"The competing passions at play througout Misericordia inevitably spill over into violence.'
Brad Hanford, Slant magazine
'A sickly funny thriller. It concludes on a note that is perfectly and pitilessly perverse.'
Zachary Barnes, Wall Street Journal
“Marking a welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific “Stranger by the Lake,” Alain Guiraudie gives the Cannes Premiere section one of its darkly sparkling standouts with the unsettlingly offbeat “Misericordia.” In the director’s best work, Guiraudie’s trademark is to infuse genre dalliances with mordant wit and a deliciously peculiar, defiant queerness. And while it may initially appear to be straightforward…nobody could ever accuse this increasingly twisted psychodrama of playing it straight.”
Jessica Kiang, Variety
"Surprisingly hilarious, yet unsurprisingly horny."
David Fear, Rolling Stone
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"A bittersweet and unexpectedly warmhearted dark comedy about latent homosexual desire."
Kate Erbland, IndieWire
'A wildly entertaining, unpredictable and Coenesque dark comedy.'
Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru
“Guiraudie has crafted another elegantly haunting dissection of the power dynamics shaping queer sexuality, this time in the form of an fantastically tender, alluring, and peculiar small-town tale of murder, desire, and repression.”
Isaac Feldburg, RogerEbert.com
"Like for his other films — eight features and nearly as many shorts — the director creates his own unique tone, combining stark naturalistic performances reminiscent of Robert Bresson with the macabre humour and underlying suspense of Hitchcock. Talented cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) captures that mood in a series of gloomy, rain-soaked set pieces in which the sun never comes out once."
Jordan Mintzner, The Hollywood Reporter
"That equanimity is a hallmark of the director’s artistry, and the reason why his films feel authentic in a way so many others do not. Guiraudie’s drifters––a pantheon that groups together traditionally “attractive” young people and more corpulent, older figures––are never the urban-chic types that have become a staple of much commercial and arthouse French cinema. Set worlds away from Paris, most of them in that rural corner of southern France where he grew up, his works pullulate with folks who share a near-molecular relationship with the places they inhabit. Which is to say that forests, lakes, and hills never operate as simple backgrounds, but in the same way landscapes do in Romantic paintings: as extensions of the characters’ inner lives, canvases that reflect and refract their tempestuous emotions."
Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage
"A Dostoevskian masterwork. The film’s title sounds more esoteric than it actually is; “Miséricorde” is merely French for “mercy. Guiraudie sits beyond all judgment, beyond morality, and is a true radical as a humanism absolutist. He makes us contemplate the world as described by the famous aphorism at the heart of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—if god does not exist, then everything is permitted. A Dostoevskian masterwork.
Ankit Jhunjhunwala, The Playlist
"Misericordia is a film that manages to have fun with itself while still presenting provocative questions about life, death, love and guilt. Writer and director Alain Guiraudie’s handle on tone within this piece is unlike anything I have ever witnessed before. With pitch-perfect performances from a knockout cast to a truly singular story, Misericordia is a one-of-one film that you have to see to believe"
Hayley Croke, Loud and Clear
"The films of French writer-director Alain Guiraudie can be dark (killer-at-a-cruising-ground drama Stranger By The Lake). They can be comic (his last film, terrorism-anxiety comedy Nobody’s Hero). Or they can be flat-out bizarre (quest fantasy No Rest for the Brave). But some things are absolutely consistent: a testing of the conventions of fiction, a focus on the lawless vagaries of desire, and a playfully left-field sensibility that is uniquely Guiraudie’s.
...initially seems to promise a low-key, straight-down-the-line French rural melodrama. But then it takes a few confounding thriller detours before showing its hand as a philosophical (and even somewhat theological) disquisition on guilt, redemption and the necessity of transgression in a messed-up world."
Jonathan Romney, Screen International
