It’s no news to anyone — we’ve known it since “Hansel & Gretel.” Bad things happen in the woods. To prove that that essential truth has gone unchanged since the days of Grimm’s fairy-tales, the woods are the chosen terrain in which auteur Alain Guiraudie stages the central plot turn of his latest movie, Misericordia (2024). The moody and intriguing thriller opens this Friday at Laemmle Theatres.

The event, and its aftermath, are delivered by a klatch of French character actors playing rural townsfolk who manage, over the course of a 90-minute film, to spin their own web of suspicion, blame, guilt, projection, and paranoia.

Misericordia takes place in one of those cookie-cutter, gray French villages where ya’d think ya’d have some privacy. Well, you don’t … so … into the woods you go! Back in town, everyone is learning your business faster than you can even make it up.

A stranger, Jérémie (a well-cast Félix Kysyl), enters the villagers’ midst. It’s revealed that he’s less a stranger than a former resident on a return visit. His vibe is earnest as he consoles the widow of the dearly departed, his former boo, mentor, and possible lover. The now-lonely widow (Catherine Frot) takes Jérémie in — to the considerable displeasure of her son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand, in a jarring, nuance-lacking performance). Jérémie also reconnects with a former pal, a big-guy messy bachelor marvelously played by David Ayala. Enter the town curé, Father Grisolles, oozing sexual repression and possible perversity. (And yet, his role evolves into the film’s moral center.) Each of these characters in Guiraudie’s carefully scripted yarn manifests, or hints at, having the hots for one another.

Misericordia is a pleasure to view, studded as it is with lovely natural mountains, forests, and craggy country roads. Its oh-so-French lines of dropped dialogue hang in space in all ambiguity. A black-humor bit concerning the chewy, succulent items that pop up in the forest’s dark shadows, morels, gives a welcome change of pace to an otherwise pretty gnarly tale.

Misericordia | Laemmle Theatres, opens Friday

Arts journalist Debra Levine is founder/editor/publisher of arts●meme.

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