By Peter Keough

Director Alain Guiraudie’s latest film is a darkly hilarious, polymorphously perverse paean to compassion.

Misericordia, directed by Alain Guiraudie. At the Kendall Square Cinema starting March 28.

Félix Kysyl in Misericordia. Photo: CG Cinéma.

A few years ago mushrooms and those who love them played an inordinately large role in offbeat films. From the fascinating Fantastic Fungi: The Magic Beneath Us (2019), to The Truffle Hunters (2020), to the Nicolas Cage tour de force Pig (2021, Arts Fuse review), the ambiguous lifeform briefly ruled the indie screens. Now they are back, though in a supporting role, in Alain Guiraudie’s darkly hilarious, polymorphously perverse paean to empathy, Misericordia. Here the black-capped, phallic morels are cast as savory favorites that lure foodie hunters into the woods in the Occitanie region of Southern France, where they sprout in the darnedest of places.

But it’s not the morels that have drawn Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) back to his Occitanie hometown of Saint-Martial. In fact, nobody really knows why he’s back, perhaps not even Jérémie himself — though some have their suspicions. Ostensibly he has come to pay his respects to the recently deceased village baker, his former boss. Perhaps he’s interested in taking over the dead man’s bakery, given that he has apparently lost his job working in a big industrial bakery in Toulouse. Vincent (Joe Rogan look-alike Jean-Baptiste Durand), Jérémie’s former friend who is the baker’s pugnacious, hot-headed son suspects he is after his mother, Martine (Catherine Frot), the baker’s wife. That may be fine with Martine, who is lonely and stressed (the wayward Vincent is more a source of anxiety than consolation for her). She invites Jérémie to stay a while and take over Vincent’s old bedroom.

Thus begins a very complicated version of the Oedipal complex, in which the hero appears to lust not after his own mother but that of a childhood friend. But he also might have the hots for the dead baker. He moons over a photo in the family album of the deceased wearing a Speedo (he finally asks Martine if she can get him a copy). Whatever his motive, he seems to have a Teorema-like effect on the household and others in the neighborhood. That includes another old friend, the portly sad sack Walter (David Ayala), and L’abbé Philippe (Jacques Develay), the village priest.

Ah, the village priest. Had the title cleric in Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951) lived to an old age and moved south, he might have resembled this unassuming but perpetually surprising prelate. Like the Spanish Inquisition, you never know when he might pop up next. First seen delivering a eulogy at the baker’s interment (spoken by him, an invocation of the power of love and the metaphorical significance of bread do not sound pat), he keeps bumping into Jérémie at the oddest moments. Is he a guardian angel, an embodiment of the young man’s conscience, or a tempting devil? Or all three?

Be that as it may, like the crop of morels sprouting from an embarrassing spot in the forest, the story takes a little while to bloom. As in his 2013 The Stranger By the Lake, Guiraudie spends the first third or so of the film immersed in quotidian details, routines, and rituals. It seems we spend a lot of time with Jérémie as he tries to sleep, mesmerized by the digital display on the clock by his bedside. Or he’ll chat with Martine, go for a walk to visit old haunts in town like Walter’s ramshackle house, or roam through the woods, which are gold, glowing, and autumnal, peopled with gnarled trees, some fallen, with the occasional mushroom hunters bearing baskets. These scenes are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s landscapes painted at Arles and contrast vividly with the dreary, kitschy interiors and charmless village streets.

Once this quotidian atmosphere has been established though, things happen fast and unexpectedly. For example, I was not prepared to see Jérémie, apropos of nothing, search amidst the reeky clutter of Walter’s bedroom and then emerge wearing a sour pair of his friend’s underwear. Even when you think the film is about to take a turn that would make for an elegant twist on a particularly effective episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (those pesky morels!), there occurs what seems to be a case of divine intervention. All due, perhaps, as the creepy village policeman quips, to “the power of desire,” not to mention the quality of mercy, unstrained.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).