Misericordia

However high the stakes, the tone remains strangely equable – as in Alfred Hitchcock’s blackly comic The Trouble With Harry, another autumn movie, where vitality and morbidity are so interwoven it’s impossible to tell them apart.

Misericordia feels like a big metaphysical shrug, sluggish to the point of lethargy.

The cast finesses the material without a misstep as the pent-up townsfolk orbit around cryptic, magnetic Jérémie, played by Félix Kysyl. P

The mysteries that are harbored inside of the characters may be hard to pry out at first. But look again, and you can deduce more about what lies under the surface and then consider what it says about you.

It isn’t entirely satisfying -- there are too many unfulfilled subplots and murky motivations -- but this intriguingly tricky drama has a perverse appeal.

A simmering stewpot of rural melodrama and murder that called to my mind both Patricia Highsmith and the late, great Claude Chabrol, only with a playfully mean queer subtext.

Aimlessness spontaneously dovetails into malfeasance in this aggressively weird offering from “Stranger by the Lake” auteur Alain Guiraudie.

What initially seems to be a reflection on mercy turns into a black comedy loaded with criticisms, or perhaps reflections, about religion, desire and lies. [Full review in Spanish]

A well-baked character-driven story with deadpan humor and intrigue.

...Misericordia...reaffirms [Alain Guiraudie's] filmography, full of freedom and boldness. [Full review in Spanish]