A Tom Ripley… mushroom hunter!

Because Mercywon the Golden Spike at the last Valladolid festival and was ranked first on the prestigious magazine's list of best films of 2024 Cahiers du cinema, it seems as if there is carte blanche to sprinkle any conversation or text about it with quotes and cultured references. That it seems like an adaptation of a lost George Simenon novel that Claude Chabrol never made, that Buñuel would surely have laughed watching it, that it seems like a remake sarcastic Theorem by Pasolini, that if the character of Félix Kysyl could share blood relations with Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley... In reality, everything is much simpler and it is not necessary to invoke the memory of these great names to understand and enjoy the latest film by Alain Guiraudie.

If any viewer goes to the cinema without having seen any films or read any books by the aforementioned authors, even if they have not seen any previous work by Guiraudie, they will find themselves facing a clumsy and malicious comedy that questions rural life as a yearned-for Arcadia of pure morality. This is not the first time that this French director has set his stories with a farmer with similar demystifying intentions: The king of evasion either The Stranger by the Lake I already pointed out that the countryside – always so idealized as an antagonist of the city full of vices – was not a paradise lost by way of comedy queer or by the criminal network, as also happens here.

Mercy It mocks this urban trend of returning to the village after a failed investigation and mixes mushrooms, cassocks, mountain police, and non-standard sex. All of this, and perhaps because of its Catalan participation (co-produced by Andergraun Films, Albert Serra's production company), makes this crime among the llenegues reminiscent of that unusual prank by Joaquim Jordà, A body in the woods (Wow, another movie quote…) Hilarious. Comedy of the year?