Misericordia (Criterion Premieres)

A web of secrets, suspicions, and desires ensnares the inhabitants of an insular French village in this tantalizing comic thriller from ever-audacious auteur Alain Guiraudie. Returning to his rural hometown to attend the funeral of the mentor he loved, enigmatic, sexually fluid drifter Jeremie (Felix Kysyl) stirs up long-simmering feelings of lust, jealousy, and rage among those he left behind including the dead man's widow (Catherine Frot), her hot-tempered son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), and a curiously protective local priest (Jacques Develay) with whom Jeremie forges a twisted bond. Amid the evocatively earthy milieu, Guiraudie constructs a slippery, continuously surprising moral universe where love and hatred, eroticism and violence, spiritual grace and mortal sin, are intimately entwined.