The erotic thriller is alive & well . . . in France and in France only. From François Ozon’s Double Lover to Justine Triet’s Sibyl to Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart, all of the best erotic thrillers in recent memory have been French productions, likely because the European festival circuit is the last surviving refuge for Mid-Budget Movies for Adults. Even the master of the Hollywood erotic thriller, Paul Verhoeven, had to make his most recent contributions to the genre there, in Benedetta & Elle. French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie has been a recent MVP in keeping the genre alive in particular, at least since making his beachside cruising thriller Stranger by the Lake. Lower-profile follow-ups like Staying Vertical and, now, Misericordia have kept up the eroticism of Guiraudie’s 2013 name-maker, even if they’ve strayed a little further from real-world logic into outright surrealism. Staying Vertical found Guiraudie making a Charlie Kauffman-style existential thriller about a writer’s block crisis that spirals its protagonist’s life out of control . . . with unexpected jags of menacing eroticism. With Misericordia, he’s made a surprisingly gentle, grounded variation of the Pasolini classic Teorema . . . with unexpected jags of menacing eroticism. God bless the great nation of France and all the perverts therein, Guiraudie especially.

Drawing inspiration from Terence Stamp’s angelic slut in Teorema, Félix Kysyl stars in Misericorida as a mysterious outsider who serves as the target for an entire community’s sexual desires. Only, in this case he’s not a total stranger to those many, many potential sex partners. Jérémie returns to his hometown from a life in the Big City to mourn the loss of his former employer, the town baker. He lingers beyond the normal funereal mourning process to relive his teen years in the home of the recently widowed baker’s wife, where he’s constantly bombarded by unspoken sexual advances from everyone in the small-town social circle: the widow, her priest, her son, and her son’s best friend – the last two of whom seem totally unaware that they’re even flirting. All of this social pressure and the expiration of his welcome quickly culminate in a violent crime that leaves Jérémie under surveillance & interrogation by the local cops. He spends his days halfheartedly foraging for mushrooms in the woods to appear innocently busy. Meanwhile, he’s paranoid about leading the cops to the shallowly buried evidence of his crime of passion, which has become a suspiciously fertile garden bed for off-season mushrooms. Everyone seems to know he’s guilty, but no one wants to turn him in, in case they might be able to consummate their lust for him. Yet, he can’t leave town without looking like he’s fleeing a crime scene. He’s essentially imprisoned by his fuckability.

There are no actual sex scenes in Misericorida, which sounds absurd for a Teorema riff from the director of Stranger by the Lake. It’s a low-key, autumnal thriller that propels itself with sexual tension, though, often so erotically charged in its otherwise casual exchanges of dialogue that the entire project plays like an understated prank.  There’s something undeniably perverse, for instance, when Jérémie is pressured to receive the town priest’s confession from the ordained side of the booth. Although there’s no actual sex, Guiraudie finds room to squeeze in two on-screen dicks – one limp, one erect. There’s even something slyly funny about Félix Kysyl’s costuming as Jérémie, styling the 30-something actor’s hair with an inappropriately boyish look that presents him as a kind of expired twink. Does that look say something about his arrested adolescence, possibly as a result of his past sexual tension with the now-deceased town baker? I have no idea, but it does add to the strangeness of his erotic dynamic with his more geriatric sexual suitors. In general, it’s difficult to pinpoint any specific social commentary or prescriptive point of view in Guiraudie’s work. If his quietly surreal erotic thrillers say anything about the world, it’s just that sex & violence are a constant aspect of human nature, as natural of forces as the wind blowing trees outside. For whatever reason, those winds just seem to blow harder & louder in France.

-Brandon Ledet