Writing about Alain Guiraudie's transcendent ‘MISERICORDIA’ for Reverse Shot's 10 Best Films of 2025

I wrote here about Reverse Shot’s No.9 picture of 2025: MISERICORDIA (it was number 1 on my list).

“Vacillating through genres, as life does—social drama; noir; suspense; satire; farce—Guiraudie audaciously rejects the single-mindedness of most modern drama, and leans into and sublimates the great mystery of desire. Motives are cloaked in darkness, and our discombobulation is a perverse cinephilic comfort. By framing its intrigue as a return to a past we never quite discover, the film exhibits a curious melancholic nostalgia for the bland and weird, and finally promotes the uncontrollable and the inexplicable: cinema as one bafflement after another.”