Misericordia · reception & legacy

How Misericordia has been received, argued over, and remembered.

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.

Named by the director

Influences Alain Guiraudie has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

• 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.