mushrooms

Misericordia (2025)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

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

Gaia (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

The danger of indulging in a steady diet of genre films is that it can dilute the taste of individual flavors, leaving only the impression of the bulk.  What I mean to say is that I had a difficult time appreciating the South African eco-horror Gaia on its own terms, since I had already indulged in the similarly-flavored British horror In the Earth just a few months ago.  Both films are about research scientists suffering foot injuries that leave them vulnerable in the care of eco-terrorists who’ve betrayed humanity in the man-vs-Nature divide, driven mad by psychedelic mushroom spores and their isolation in the wilderness.  In the Earth tells that story with the gusto of a video-nasty slasher about an axe-wielding maniac.  By contrast, Gaia aims for the delicate arthouse psychedelia of highbrow indies like Monos & Icaros.  As a pair, they speak to a modern cultural preoccupation with the spiritual corrosion of technology and our tenuous place in Nature.  Individually, they present a reductive “Who wore it better?” contest where the answer is as subjective as it is frivolous.

Gaia is wonderfully beautiful & strange.  Whereas In the Earth pushes its horror genre tropes to their extremes, Gaia finds its own extremity in its man-vs-Nature iconography.  Both films distort high-def nature footage into mirrored, kaleidoscopic freak-outs of time-elapse psychedelia, triggered by the mushroom spore-poisoned air.  Gaia goes a step further by melding those mushrooms with the human body, allowing Nature to reclaim human flesh as part of its organic, deep-forest tapestry.  Sometimes, those human-mushroom hybrids are oddly beautiful – like a multi-colored fungal bouquet.  Often, they’re grotesque mushroom-zombie creatures who blindly attack unconverted humans on Nature’s behalf.  Most of the film’s terror derives from Nature’s commands to the lowly humans beneath it, and the vengeful smiting that results when they stray from its plan.  Nature is closer to the Old Testament version of God in that way than the hippie-dippy spirituality implied by the film’s title.  There is a wisdom & a majesty to it that humans would be smart to obey, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a monster.

Despite its formal beauty, I’m surprised to say Gaia didn’t mean as much to me as the similarly themed eco-horror In The Earth, even though that’s the messier, trashier one of the pair.  It might just be that I had already done all my contemplation about the violent divide between Nature & modern living for the year in that earlier film, so all I had left to think about during this round was how pretty the mushrooms looked.  My only coherent thought about Gaia is that I think Björk would be very happy as a mushroom person, but I probably already knew that going in.  Otherwise, it’s a very good film that I might’ve believed to be great if I didn’t spend all my free time seeking out other genre pictures exactly like it.

-Brandon Ledet

In the Earth (2021)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Understandably, there have been hundreds of attempts to make timely COVID-era films over the past year and a half. Most of these productions are on the level of Doug Liman’s Locked Down: throwaway novelties of limited scope & budget that’re only worthwhile as cultural time capsules of the minor inconveniences and quirks of daily life that define this never-ending global pandemic for most people surviving it. I’m interested in this burgeoning exploitation genre the way I am with most fad-cinema novelties of the past: disco musicals, aerobics-craze horrors, sports dramas about skateboarders, etc.  There is something especially cynical & dark about exploiting COVID-era “lockdown life”, though, since this particular global “fad” comes with a real-life bodycount in the millions.  From what I’ve seen so far, there have only been three works of COVID cinema that have really grappled with the grief, isolation, and exhaustion of the pandemic: the “screenlife” cyberghost story Host, the Bo Burnham video diary Inside, and Ben Wheatley’s psychedelic folk horror In the Earth.  This is likely a cinematic subject we’ll be unraveling for the rest of our lives, since it affects every last person on the planet, but genuinely great films made in the thick of this ongoing crisis have so far been in short supply.

For its part, In the Earth smartly reflects on the maddening grief of COVID-19 indirectly, from a distance. Its characters discuss the social isolation of quarantine and the bureaucratic discomforts of routine testing, but they never specify the exact scope or nature of the virus they’re protecting themselves from.  It’s less about the specific daily safety measures of COVID in particular, but more about how a year of social & spiritual isolation has permanently remapped their brains in chaotic, fucked up ways. By stepping away from the lockdown restrictions of city life to instead stage its COVID-flavored horror show in the woods, it recontextualizes this never-ending global crisis as a dual Man vs. Nature and Man vs. Man struggle, attempting to document something a little more philosophical about the absurdity, violence, and emptiness of living right now.  Its two central villains are trying to directly bargain with Nature through science and through religious mysticism, respectively, as if all our modern ills can only be solved by radically overhauling the way we live among each other on this planet (which feels right, even if nearly impossible).

A field researcher is guided by a park ranger into the thick of British wilderness, searching for a rogue scientist who’s gone off the grid and off the rails in her recent experiments.  They eventually find the mad scientist, who is directly communicating with trees trough a convoluted system of strobe lights & synthesizers she’s arranged in the woods like a sinister art instillation.  In her mind, this human-to-Nature line of communication could potentially unlock some great, authentic power that will help us better understand (and potentially command) our place in the global ecosystem.  The philosophical counterpoint to her experiment and the main obstacle on our journey to her is an axe-wielding maniac who stalks the woods.  His plan to reconnect with Nature involves local folklore rituals that honor the elder god Parnag Fegg, The Spirit of the Woods.  The advocate for science and the advocate for religion are both violently insane, of course, but they have a way of luring in the two new interlopers in the woods with calm, disarmingly kind demeanors that make them vulnerable to their respective extremist rhetoric. These are extreme times, after all, and the social isolation of the past year has made us all a little batty in our own special ways.

I can’t tell you exactly what Ben Wheatley was trying to communicate with this gory, psychedelic horror show, nor do I really want to hear the specifics of his intent.  As a horror movie, it’s perfectly entertaining & unsettling mix of sci-fi, folk horror, and woodland slasher genre tropes.  The surgical details of the axe wounds are just as effectively upsetting as the psychedelic freak-outs of its strobe light centerpiece.  As a nightmare reflection of our collective, COVID-era mindset, it’s much more difficult to pin down exactly what it’s doing except to say that it’s impressively strange, upsetting stuff considering its limited scope & budget.  So many movies being made in and about these times are so caught up in the mundane, practical details of daily life that they never transcend the novelty of its setting.  In the Earth is a rare example of COVID Cinema that aims for something a little more intangible and indescribable — something that captures the existential horrors of current life rather than the logistical ones.

-Brandon Ledet