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...