Misericordia

Expectations by great reviews dashed. I wish it was clever. Not original. I was hoping for his fascinating and dangerous "Stranger by the Lake."

It's a miss for me. Nothing worked for me. I kept waiting for something to explain this man's strange behavior and it never appeared. It's just an odd, not mystery, not character study, barely a movie at all. I know, people will say I'm just dumb and didn't get it, but I would argue that I routinely watch challenging films. In fact, I enjoy them very much when they actually have something to say. This does not speak to me in any way. Maybe if I were French it would?

Perhaps because I just watched two similarly bleak crime movies – no sound track, lots of empty landscape – one set in an Austrian village, the other a more standard mystery set in a small Australian town, it was overkill for me, pun intended. Compared to to the films by other great French directors like Chabrol, Jean-Pierre Melville, Eric Rohmer (who also makes movies where seemingly nothing happens yet they are engaging), Claire Denis, watching this was like chewing on a wet rag. I want to make allowances, I watched it on a computer screen so perhaps the visual impact of the forest landscape, the rain, just didn't come through, but the whole death/sex connection has been treated in film so many times and so much better by other directors, that this movie just felt flat. I had no interest in the characters, almost all of whom were creeps, it was unbelievably slow for a story that could have been told in 10 minutes or less. This is yet another director who makes movies about the rural life or working class people, which begs the question why when these directors were never or are no longer working class or living in small town, these movies always become condescending, use the population as a base for their jokes enjoyed by middle class urban dwellers, and feel unauthentic. Who is the audience for this movie is a key question to ask, which gives you insight into the director's mind and intent of making the movie and if it's a particular population or group that provides entertainment for another population, then this is for me a suspicious motive right then and there.