Sightlines · reception
How Misericordia was received
2024 · Alain Guiraudie · Misericordia on Sightlines
The arc
Cannes famously kept it out of the 2024 Competition — parked in the Cannes Première sidebar — and then Cahiers du Cinéma crowned it the best film of the year and it won the Prix Louis Delluc, making the snub look sillier by the month. By its 2025 US release through Sideshow/Janus it had become an arthouse sleeper and Guiraudie's biggest stateside hit.
What’s debated
The perennial fight is over its tone — audiences split on whether it's a deadpan comedy, a thriller that refuses to thrill, or a moral provocation, with critics' rapture (Cahiers #1) sitting awkwardly next to a shruggy general-audience IMDb score.
Its footprint
The morel mushroom instantly became the film's emblem — it's on the marketing, all over Letterboxd reviews, and headline writers could not resist the puns (Sight and Sound went with 'loose morels'). John Waters gave it his loudest blurb of the year, calling it 'an impossibly perverse thriller' with 'a lulu of an ending.'
Where it stands
A canon climber with cult credentials — the consensus 'best Guiraudie since Stranger by the Lake,' arriving pre-anointed to Letterboxd's horny-French-thriller pantheon.
Did you know? Guiraudie adapted it from a strand of his own sprawling, thousand-page 2021 novel Rabalaïre.
Named by the director
- Ingmar Bergman — Guiraudie has said he's more of a Bergman enthusiast — citing his framing — while explicitly waving off the constant Chabrol comparisons, whose cynicism toward his characters he says he feels 'very far removed' from.