Misericordia: mercy is a messy business in Alain Guiraudie’s teasing rural melodrama

“We need murders,” muses Abbé Grisolles (Jacques Develay) toward the end of Misericordia. Grisolles keeps his beady eye trained on the various members of his flock in Saint-Martial, a small, rundown village in the Massif Central, the southern French highland district that generally serves as the backdrop for the films of Alain Guiraudie. We need murders, Grisolles proposes, because they offer opportunities for humility, compassion and mercy (in Latin: misericordia). 

But that suggestion might be a pious convenience on his part: after all, the murder at the centre of this story brings about an outcome that suits Grisolles quite nicely, in a distinctly worldly sort of way. At the same time, he might be speaking for us, the audience. As a group, we cinemagoers can’t get enough of killing and, like many of the characters in Misericordia, we’re willing to come to all kinds of accommodations, conscious or otherwise, with those who kill when it suits our interests or desires. 

In its teasing, unsettling exploration of such inclinations, Misericordia works as a potent companion piece to Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013), another story in which the company of a killer is ardently, knowingly sought. Most films, most filmmakers, flatter our moral vanity by providing the pleasures of such complicity before asserting a return to moral convention – the bad guy punished – and sending us on our way. Guiraudie, not so much.

Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to Saint-Martial for the funeral of JeanPierre (Serge Richard), the local baker for whom he worked as a teenager a couple of decades earlier, before he left for Toulouse. It ’s a chance to reconnect with Jean-Pierre’s stoical widow Martine (Catherine Frot) and temperamental son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) as well as another adolescent peer, Walter (David Ayala), a bit of a shut-in who enjoys a breakfast pastis. It’s also a chance to reconnect with the village itself, whose small stone houses lie nestled in misty woods and fields. They have a slightly eerie feel, beautiful but oppressive, somewhat out of time, making them an overcast autumnal, upland counterpart to the dazzling shoreside summerscapes of Stranger by the Lake. (Cinematographer Claire Mathon elegantly shot both.) 

There’s something quietly off about Jérémie too, a stillness and openness in Kysyl’s performance that seems at first like affability or neutrality but might be something else. He’s a bit too open to Martine’s offers of hospitality – staying over after the funeral leads to getting comfortable in Vincent’s childhood room and Jean-Pierre’s old clothes – and a bit too forward, after a drink, with just about everyone. He’s native to the village, but does he belong there? What’s his game? What might his presence enable, unearth or unlock? Tom Ripley comes to mind, as does Terence Stamp’s visitor in Teorema (1968). There are points of overlap, too, with Xavier Dolan’s Tom at the Farm (2013).

The film’s plot works itself out through a range of loops, repetitions and escalations. Characters find themselves in the same rooms, the same patches of forest, having not quite the same encounters. Jérémie and Vincent’s dynamic is a particular focus, with affection, attraction and suspicion overlapping awkwardly. People in Saint-Martial are forever finding themselves in each other’s homes or encountering one another in the middle of the night or both. At one point, someone takes to setting an alarm to prepare

Guiraudie takes Hitchcock’s deadpan sensibility to another level, keeping characters’ motivations and desires ambiguous to us as well as each other, leaving it unclear whether the joke is on us, them or everyone for the latest dreamlike nocturnal incursion. Pride, jealousy, insecurity and longing bubble under. Things boil over or take strange turns, some soon forgotten, some irrecoverable. 

As in Stranger by the Lake, the arrival of the police – here a mildly mismatched duo (Sébastien Faglain and Salomé Lopes) – increases the dramatic stakes and the opportunities for absurd laughs. 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. Some business with a mushroom omelette gives new meaning to bad taste. With its consistent attention to contingent absurdities, the film could be classed as a comedy.

Guiraudie, though, takes Hitchcock’s deadpan sensibility to another level, keeping characters’ motivations and desires ambiguous to us as well as each other, leaving it unclear whether the joke is on us, them or everyone. It’s an ethically skew-whiff world, certainly by cinematic standards. Some things that convention dictates should provoke anxiety or anger do so while other instances of the same are taken disarmingly in stride. What, we wonder, will result in a punch, a shrug or a clinch? A queerly polymorphous sexuality is at work, making it tricky to track who’s into whom and who has a problem with it. 

Multiple channels of desire are open and not just among the normatively sexy. This is typical for Guiraudie, one of whose novels (Now the Night Begins, 2018) features an ailing old man as an object of intense infatuation. Less typical for his work is the lack of any actual sex scenes – there are two conspicuous instances of male nudity here, but these tell us more about exposure than lust. 

What lies beneath all this fluid skulduggery is a sense of roiling repressed urges, Eros and Thanatos, taboo and transgression, the draw of the dirt. (Bataille and Sade are key influences for Guiraudie.) But it’s also a story about those basic, normal needs, bread and love. It’s surely no accident that the narrative catalyst is the death of the local baker, a figure and service whose decline has functioned as a potent emblem for social, cultural and economic shifts in contemporary France. The provision of bread, Grisolles says at the funeral, was Jean-Pierre’s calling, and it ’s part of Jérémie’s allure that, in returning home, he seems to offer a way to keep the oven burning. 

Grisolles also speaks at the graveside of the universal need for love, and it’s tempting to imagine this might serve as a skeleton key for the complex, sometimes opaque words and deeds of Saint-Martial’s inhabitants. But Grisolles says a lot of things. By the time he returns to the subject later in the film – to suggest “I can love everyone” – things have shifted. Mercy, it turns out, is a messy business.

► Misericordia is in UK cinemas from 28 March.