Alain Guiraudie’s marvelously unsentimental French thriller begins in a mood of death, one it never quite shakes as events pick up in a twisty way. A baker has died. He lived in the remote commune of Saint-Martial, making loaves for what appear to be a small number of neighbors. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), at one time a teenage apprentice to this man but now a drifting, wan-faced adult with a lank crop of hair, has returned to stand by his corpse and grieve.
Or maybe he’s not grieving so much as thinking, back in the town of his boyhood where the baker’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), stirred by Jérémie’s presence, insists he stay a while in the empty bedroom of his ex-chum Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), now grown up and moved out with his own family. There’s a backstory here, salty and suggestive, but Guiraudie sprinkles it on as sparingly as he can, waiting for his plot to rise to fullness. Jérémie may have loved his mentor, his wife, too, maybe more than that. And Vincent isn’t crazy about his homecoming.
“Misericordia,” both as a title and a film, would suggest a plunge into mourning or, to go by the Latin translation, something close to compassionate mercy. Delightfully, Guiraudie has no interest in making that movie. He 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. “Misericordia” plays out in a stream of nighttime surprises (these are bakers with ungodly hours), including the repeated sight of Vincent hovering over the houseguest sleeping in his old bed.
None of this gets churning cellos or the jump-scare treatment of most American thrillers (Marc Verdaguer’s score walks a tightrope of synthy suggestiveness). Even when there is a murder — it’s a real ouch — Guiraudie continues with his insistent, deliberate flow, a sophisticated touch that will either endear you to the film’s subversion or make you yearn for something more melodramatic.
Try to resist that impulse. You’ll miss the pair of awkward local cops (Sébastien Faglain and Salomé Lopes) who, in a welcome stretch of dark comedy, approach the case in such an unhurried, nonjudgmental manner, it feels more like a hobby for them. They, too, keep some strange midnight hours, as does a berobed local priest, Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), whose demeanor hides a bold streak and a penchant for showing up in the right place at the wrong time.
This isn’t the kind of puzzle thriller in which all the elements click into place with a thudding literalism that compliments an attentive eye. It’s one that accommodates the vagaries of human behavior, leaving punishment aside as a secondary concern. And like the community’s morel mushrooms that seem to grow well over shallow, hastily dug graves, there’s a sense of mulchy inevitability about it. You can go home again, “Misericordia” suggests, maybe with more of an agenda the second time. Packing guilt is optional.
