Metacritic reviews

This is rigorous filmmaking of the highest order, controlled and precise to the exclusion of anything extraneous —evidenced by its taut 100-minute runtime.

For all its morbid undertones and philosophical ruminations, Misericordia is neither a dirge nor a lofty symposium. Strange as it may be to say for a story that begins with a burial and then shatters after a heinous death, this is a supremely and surprisingly funny film, where humor gradually accrues a subversiveness not unlike desire’s own.

Instead it’s a slippery, changeable parable about a particularly amoral cuckoo looking to feather a new nest.

This might suggest that Misericordia is ultimately a film with a message, and a more solemn one than we’re used to with Guiraudie. But any apparent clarity should be taken with a pinch of salt, the film’s meanings shifting as constantly as the erotic drives between the various male (and occasionally female) characters.

Misericordia finds Alain Guiraudie revisiting old standbys under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever.

The two movies don’t always crystallize into one, and if you’re looking for a credible crime thriller in which everyone behaves logically, Misericordia may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an exploration of repressed sexual desire and religious hypocrisy in backwoods France, Guiraudie’s strange and sober new film does the trick.