Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), comes back to a rural mountain town to attend his childhood friend, Vincent (Jean Baptiste Durand)'s father's funeral. He hadn't been to the village in ages. Aimless and recently unemployed in Beaudoux where he lives now, Jérémie decides to stay at the kind widow Martine (Catherine Frot)'s home and sleeping in Vincent's old room (Vincent is married, has a kid and lives nearby). There's some kind of past between two men, as they tussle in the woods like schoolboys. There's also a tinge of jealousy in Vincent as Jérémie surreptitiously invites himself into his life (first his mom, then his friends). There surely must be some sinister motives. Is he trying to take over the dead father's bakery? Is he trying to sleep with mom?
Things get complicated when Jérémie tries to seduce a local schlub and friend of Vincent, Walter (David Ayala) and Walter rebuffs his drunken advances with a shotgun. Soon after, things get boiled over and Jérémie ends up killing Vincent, after another violent tussle in the woods. The rest of the film is a police thriller of sort, Guiraudie style.
Guiaudie's a master at absurdist humor that is still very much down to earth. Think Misericordia as stripped down, depoliticized, working class Teorema where one person seduces everyone around him willingly or unwillingly. Jérémie is not a Godot, or American Uncle or your ideal manifest in a human form. He is full flesh and blood with his own desires and people somehow love him back. The police is on his track because of his shaky alibi, but it's the local priest who give him cover. Love works in stange ways. Misericordia is a delightful, absurdist comedy that says a lot about strange human desires and attractions.
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