Misericordia (Miséricorde) ★★★

Availability: Still showing in theaters in major US metropolitan areas. No streaming information at this time. See JustWatch here for future online and purchase options.

Follow the Mushrooms

The first scene of this film—of a lone driver navigating at night the curving, densely wooded roads of rural southern France—suggests something of what is to come. The camera, rather than showing us what the driver sees, tracks the vehicle’s view as it moves around the curve—woods, more woods, then, finally, and with some relief, the road ahead. Mystery rather than knowledge. Photographed from behind and from the side, the driver, too, is mysterious—is it a man, or a woman?

Mushroom hunting in the dark, complex woods leads to encounters that appear to be by chance. Above,  Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl), left, and the local priest (Jacques Develay).

The driver, we’ll learn, is Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl), on his way to the village of Saint-Martial, where he once served as apprentice to the town baker, who has just died. He’ll attend the funeral for the baker, of whom he was fond, then, curiously, decide to stay—for a day or two, maybe more, walking in the dense and rainy woods and vaguely suggesting that he might relocate from Toulouse and re-open the shuttered bakery.

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The decline of village life is a wound serving as a backdrop to the narrative.

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Saint-Martial, a real place that a decade ago had something less than 250 inhabitants, is a claustrophobic locale. Director Alain Guiraudie lets us see only a few houses and their cramped interiors, and a tiny square—no villagers walking by or looking from behind curtains—where the recently widowed baker’s wife, Martine (Catherine Frot), lives above the closed bakery, and where Jérémie will stay on. Not only is there no longer a bakery (think of the French without their daily baguettes), there is no café. The decline of village life is a wound serving as a backdrop to the narrative.

Consistent with that first scene, Jérémie is a low-affect (he never smiles), androgynous, enigmatic presence, his face a tabula rasa. Though he grew up and worked in the village, he’s now, Shane-like, the proverbial stranger-who-comes-from-nowhere, entering an enclosed world. He’s a disrupter.

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Whatever Jérémie wants—and one of the pleasures of the film is trying to figure that out—the village would seem an odd place to find it.

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Whatever Jérémie wants—and one of the pleasures of the film is trying to figure that out—the village would seem an odd place to find it. As if the film were a play, his social universe there is sparse and its inhabitants mostly unreceptive or downright hostile. The baker’s big, brawny, married son Vincent (Serge Richard) resents Jérémie’s presence, figuring he wants to get into his mother’s pants. That isn’t an entirely unreasonable thought, though Martine is twice his age, knows that Jérémie was once in love with her baker husband, and shows little interest in a relationship. Neighbor Walter Bonchamp (David Ayala) is an unappealing slob. Then there’s the jowly local priest (Jacques Develay as l'abbé Philippe Griseul). That’s the whole crew. The priest, Vincent, and Jérémie enjoy hunting for mushrooms in the damp fall woods, which yields ample opportunity for “chance” encounters and intrigue.

At some point, everyone harbors suspicions of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), the dark shadow in the foreground. Among those at the widowed baker's wife's (Martine, Catherine Fort, center,back) table are the two gendarmerie, left, and slobby Walter (David Ayala), right.

Despite this unappealing cast of characters, Jérémie sticks around. He tries and fails to seduce Walter. He tries on and wears the baker’s clothes for a bemused, and perhaps confused, Martine (it won’t be the only incidence of a change of clothes). Vincent takes out his resentment (or desire) physically, challenging the smaller and weaker Jérémie to wrestle and defend himself. The local hothead, Vincent is inherently unlikeable, though his treatment of Jérémie indicates some intuitive sense of the interloper’s sexualized nature. L'abbé Philippe is off Jérémie’s radar.

Award-winning Guiraudie’s 2013 “Stranger by the Lake” has a similar narrative arc. Full frontal nudity is more natural in that work, filmed at a gay nudist beach. Here, it seems gratuitous.

Jérémie ‘s sticking around and the occasional sexualized innuendo are innocent enough. Until they aren’t. Jérémie does a very bad thing. “Misericordia” becomes a noir tale, and Jérémie is in too deep to do anything but lie and lie some more, and with all the players, including the earnest gendarmerie, suspicious at one time or another that the slick outsider is the perp. In a surprising and bizarre church confessional—the creative highlight of the film—the priest takes center stage, offering Jérémie a way out while raising challenging personal and ethical questions, as if the lowly cleric were Saint Augustine. The mythic morel mushrooms—said to grow in cemeteries, on top of graves—play their part, pushing their way to the surface, suggesting what’s below.

Unlike Shane, a moral character who resists temptation (the rancher’s wife), Jérémie is inscrutable, his desires unclear, and his ethics, if any, to be revealed. Then he does the bad thing, and from that point on he more resembles Fred MacMurry’s Walter Neff in 1944’s “Double Indemnity,” a deeply flawed man, but one we care about, because he’s all we have. Caring for Jérémie, a corrupt soul who has committed a crime, comes with its own ethical considerations. But again, he’s all we have.

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He says: Overly contrived. Wouldn’t Jérémie’s prospects be better in Toulouse? Entertaining nonetheless.

She says: I’m glad I didn’t know it was labeled as a gay film. It rises above that narrow label.

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Date: 2025 (US release)

Director: Alain Guiraudie

Starring: Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, David Ayala, Serge Richard

Runtime: 104 minutes

Country: France, a co-production with Spain and Portugal

Language: French, subtitled in English

Other Awards: 4 wins, 20 other nominations, including for Cannes’ Queer Palm; listed as one of Cahiers du Cinema’s top 10 2024 films