Rent Misericordia (2024)

Confession, Cover, and Small-Town Static - Misericordia review by griggs

A funeral in a small village should be straightforward. Apparently nobody told Misericordia. It starts with a familiar mystery shape, then actually commits to it — brisk, nosy, and alert to the tiny tells: who stares too long, who lies by omission, who performs grief like it’s a role.

Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) comes back to Saint-Martial after roughly ten years away for the funeral of Jean-Pierre, the baker who once mentored him. Martine (Catherine Frot) offers him Vincent’s old room — generous, but instantly tense. Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) bristles, flings accusations, and the village starts humming with rumour.

The priest (Jacques Develay) turns religion into negotiation: confession, cover, and strings attached. Best trick is how it can pivot from real unease to bedroom-farce energy without snapping the mood — even if a couple of motives stay a bit foggy. Still, it’s an enjoyably sly little pressure cooker.

You'll Never Look at the South of France in the Same Way Again... - Misericordia review by PV

This is a nice, rather nasty, subtle but snide little stab at a film with is all about secrets in a small town - and very VERY French. You couldn't get more French than the death of a baker who mentored a man returning to the village for his funeral after a decade away, meaning deep resentments and jealousies bubble to the surface of a society humming with secrets and illicit sexual desires. Envy, hatred, love, sex of all kinds - it's all here, yet hardly expressed.

A word about the title: "mis·eri·cord' is either 1) ledge projecting from the underside of a hinged seat in a choir stall which, when the seat is turned up, gives support to someone standing. Many ancient ones carved of wood in British churches; 2) an apartment in a monastery in which some relaxations of the monastic rule were permitted. 3) a small dagger used to deliver a death stroke to a wounded enemy.

Well this French film could tick all three of them.

A nice deceptively quiet and gentle story that is anything but. Be sure to concentrate because some of the undercurrents raging quietly here are subtle, the petty jealousies and hatreds of closed communities and village life, the resentment, the disappointment, the misery...

It has a few bumps, some unbelievable plot developments esp re gendarmes (SO SPOILERS). It had to end somewhere, but not sure if this was the ending I'd have chosen.

4 solid stars