Misericordia · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man kneels in a forest clearing to gather mushrooms. A few feet away, under the same soft ground, lies the body he buried there. Nothing in the shot is pitched for horror: the light stays flat, the birds keep going, and Guiraudie holds the frame a beat past comfort until you honestly don't know whether to brace or to laugh. That clearing is the whole of Misericordia in one image. Killing, burial, cruising, and foraging all happen in the same dirt, watched by a camera that declines to tell you how to feel about any of it. Watch the film through that clearing and it opens right up.

Start with what breaks. In the classical cinema Deleuze called the movement-image, a person perceives a threat and acts, and the act changes the situation — the sensory-motor circuit, situation to response and back. Jérémie kills the baker's hostile son in a burst of exactly that old logic: force meets force, a body drops. And then nothing follows. No pursuit tightens, no reckoning arrives; the missing-person inquiry just circles the village while ordinary life resumes. This is what Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image — the point where a character can no longer react adequately to what he has done, where the decisive act fails to resolve anything. Guiraudie's specific move is to give the aftermath more screen time than the act. The labor of concealment, the return to village rhythm, the too-long takes: by refusing to spike at the obvious dramatic peaks, the editing keeps you permanently off balance. Suspense stops being 'will he be caught' and becomes something stranger.

Why does the forest carry so much weight? Because Guiraudie splits his world in two, and Deleuze gives us the exact names. The village — bakery, church, lanes, Martine's kitchen — is a derived-milieu, the ordinary social surface where people watch each other and measure what is unspoken. The forest is its buried counterpart, what Deleuze called an originary-world: a savage space beneath the social one, where pure drives erupt. This is the naturalism Deleuze traced from Zola through Buñuel, and Mathon shoots it precisely as that — concealing, fertile, faintly menacing, a place outside village law. The film's engine is an impulse-image: Jérémie is pulled back to this town by an appetite he never explains, an erotic attachment to a dead man and his world, and the forest is where that appetite meets its objects. Mushrooms, a grave, a body cruised or hidden, all in one uncanny clearing.

The desire is never abstract; it lives in how bodies are placed. Guiraudie blocks men circling one another with a frank physicality that reads as courtship and as threat in the same gesture — proximity, touch, the awkward choreography of who steps toward whom. Deleuze would call this the gest: a posture that exposes a relation the dialogue won't state. You learn who wants what, and who is dangerous, from the geometry of standing bodies, not from anyone saying so.

And the camera won't rescue you. There is almost no score — Guiraudie has worked this way since Stranger by the Lake — so birdsong, wind, and footsteps in leaf litter become the whole atmosphere, and ordinary sound acquires ominous weight. He also withholds the reaction shot, the close-up that would tell you how to read a face. This is the Bazinian bargain pushed to an ethical extreme: natural light, real duration, the long take that respects ambiguity instead of resolving it. Deleuze called these stretches where nothing advances the plot dead time, and here they are exactly where the guilt and desire reverberate, unmediated.

Which brings us to the priest, and the film's title. Misericordia means mercy, and it means it in earnest. In Deleuze's relation-image, we read objects and acts through habit — see a killer discovered, expect justice to follow. The abbé breaks that chain. His serene, insinuating watchfulness leads not to exposure but to something closer to grace; he keeps the secret and shields Jérémie. Deleuze's word for the object that snaps the customary chain and forces you to think is the demark — the anomaly that won't fit the pattern. The priest is one long demark. He turns a village crime story into a fable about forgiveness without ever raising his voice, and that turn is the film's real suspense.

Guiraudie didn't invent this soil; he cultivates a specific lineage. From Chabrol's Le Boucher he takes the murderer woven seamlessly into a precisely observed provincial community, violence absorbed back into bourgeois rhythm. From Hitchcock's I Confess comes the priest as the pivot of complicit suspense, bound to keep a killer's secret. From The Trouble with Harry comes the deadpan played flat over a corpse that won't stay buried. And from Highsmith by way of Strangers on a Train and Plein Soleil he inherits the engineering of our complicity — the serene, opaque protagonist who calmly assumes a dead man's place while we quietly root for the cover-up to hold. Félix Kysyl's Jérémie is that opaque figure, boyish and unreadable, and the film runs on impunity rather than retribution.

What Misericordia does with all this is show that the crisis of the action-image can be comic. Guiraudie proves you can build genuine dread and genuine laughter from the same withheld reaction, that a thriller can flatten every peak and grow more gripping, and that mercy — not punishment — can be the thing an audience is made to crave. Watch it again for the clearing. You'll see how much the ground is holding.