Some might say that from the French auteur Alain Guiraudie we should expect the unexpected, but his signature films could be boiled down to navigating social situations in peculiar settings. For instance, with his biggest festival hit Stranger By The Lake (2013), it was the exploration of “cruising” and the possibility of romance in a secluded gay community affected by an investigation of a murder that happened inside it. Likewise, his recent Nobody’s Hero (2022) was basically a bedroom farce set against the backdrop of terrorist attacks in Clermont-Ferrand.

Misericordia is more difficult to define, since it combines the genres of mystery-thriller, relationship and psychological drama with hints of a character study and, once again, farce, in a remote, sparsely populated French village. It premiered in Cannes and we caught it...