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Showing posts from November, 2025
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  Misericordia  With nods to Hitchcock and his late French counterpart, Claude Chabrol, Alain Guiraudie continues to chart his own path in the 2024 suspense film, Misericordia . Unleashing mayhem and eroticism in placid settings is a Guiraudie specialty, and with  Misericordia , he delivers a bookend to 2013's much-lauded  Stranger By the Lake ( L'Inconnu du lac ) . Both films have similar themes of death and desire  among a small group of troubled souls in rural France. However, in the case of  Stranger By the Lake , the story unfolds through the eyes of the morally conflicted witness to a murder, while in  Misericordia , the protagonist  is  the morally conflicted murderer. Dispensing with the explicit sexual imagery of  Stranger By the Lake , Guiraudie, instead turns up the heat with what he  doesn't  show: it's a tease that works.  The plot of Misericordia  seems deceptively simple: when a young man named Jeremie...