Miséricorde (Misericordia) [2024]

 Alain Guiraudie channelled Claude Chabrol – the latter’s recurring love for delivering cutting and subversive social critiques through tales of passion and crime in provincial France – in his delectably teasing pastoral noir Miséricorde. The film also possessed a morbid sense of humour – that was at its most darkly funny in a sequence where the protagonist is served mushrooms for dinner that’ve grown at the site of a murdered man’s corpse, recalling Imamura’s penchant for macabre fun – and an increasingly absurdist streak, interlaced with charged homoerotic overtones. It began on a creepily banal note, as the protagonist – shot from his POV – drives through winding country roads in near silence; one can already sense that unseemly developments await at his destination. He’s Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a soft-spoken baker presently out-of-work, who’s returned to his bucolic hometown of Saint-Martial to attend the funeral of his former boss who he admired. Things take uncomfortable turns from get-go as the middle-aged widow (Catherine Frot), who figured Jérémie was in love with her deceased husband, offers him an extended stay at her place and is poker-faced about the ensuing intimacy, while her volatile and aggressive son (Jean-Baptiste Durand) – possibly triggered by some repressed memories – is increasingly hostile to Jérémie as he thinks that the latter is planning to seduce his mom, which rapidly escalates into violence. Jérémie, meanwhile, has a soft-corner for an unemployed pot-bellied loner, while an impish local priest (Jacques Develay), who’s also an avid forager of mushrooms, is attracted to Jérémie. The tranquil environs of this sleepy village evidently mask a saucy core rippling with delicious amorality and sizzling carnality, and this duality found sly accompaniments in this droll, playful and earthy work.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Alain Guiraudie

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Black Comedy

Language: French

Country: France

The Girl with the Needle [2024]

 Magnus von Horn’s harrowing The Girl with the Needle, that transformed a real time and a true crime event into nightmarish gothic horror, walked a razor’s edge between bleak period film, intense exercise in exploitation cinema and extreme miserabilism. With a rigorous formal grammar – informed by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare desolation, German expressionism, Lynchian grotesquerie and von Trier’s provocative portrayals of suffering – it crafted a fervid, claustrophobic and unsparing vision of deprivation, sordidness and violence. But what made it, for me, most unsettling was its moral ambiguity and troubling representations bordering on exploitative. Set in 1919 as the devastating WW1 is culminating, and in a Copenhagen that’s a hellish mix of muck and destitution, the film’s protagonist is Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) whose woes and misfortunes are portrayed with ambivalence and even apathy. Living in squalid conditions and working as a lowly seamstress at a grimy factory, she’s left pregnant – which she unsuccessfully tries aborting – when her affair with her boss comes to a cruel ended. Meanwhile her husband, who she’d assumed dead, returns with debilitating war trauma and a grisly facial disfigurement that gets him employed as a circus freak. Her life takes a seemingly positive turn when she befriends Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who claims to illicitly arrange adoptions of unwanted babies; Karoline, in turn, becomes a wet nurse to Dagmar’s 7-year-old daughter. Unbeknownst to her – and viewers who aren’t invested in Danish history – this genial middle-aged lady is the notorious Dagmar Overbye. The film, which began with overlapping images of faces grimacing into rictuses that reminds one of Goya and Munch’s paintings, bristled with visceral terror that – complemented by its disconcerting score – remained through till the end.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Magnus von Horn

Genre: Historical Drama/Crime Drama/Psychological Horror

Language: Danish

Country: Denmark

Carnival Is Over [2024]

 Fernando Coimbra, who’d shot to fame with his multi-award-winning debut film A Wolf at the Door, returned to his Brazilian milieu after a considerable gap with his deliciously twisted and riotously entertaining third feature Carnival Is Over. By infusing grand Shakesperean themes of ambition, lust and power – slyly channelling Macbeth from Lady Macbeth’s perspective – into the pulpy and lurid B-movie palettes of 80s neo-noirs and crime thrillers, Coimbra delivered a dark, violent, wickedly funny and gleefully nasty blend of highbrow and lowbrow that continuously subverted viewers' expectations right till the hilariously messy climax. Valério (Irandhir Santos) and Regina (Leandra Leal) are a married couple happily invested in their kinky role plays and living in a luxurious villa overlooking Rio de Janeiro. He’s never wanted to get into his father’s criminal underworld business even if his wealth was accorded on account of that; his father’s death, unfortunately, has complicated his exit plan, as he isn’t just riddled with debts, his scheming uncle – who’s taken ownership – is hatching plans of his own. Egged by the luscious, volatile, self-serving and splurging Regina, Valério sets in motion a counter ploy to get rid of his uncle and take charge of the operations so that he can then sell it. Ironically, once he tastes the allure of this netherworld, he takes to it like a duck to water, thereby triggering a fatal game of distrust, deceit and betrayal between the couple. The film’s sardonic humour and unpredictability were accentuated by Leal’s superb turn, Valério’s organic transformation and Regina’s mom who dishes out bad advices. The pulsating sound design, that ranged from silences and discordant notes to frenzied beats, made it all the more riveting.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Fernando Coimbra

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Black Comedy/Marital Comedy

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil