There is a running joke in the farcical odd-couple cop comedy The Other Guys (2010) in which women are constantly, sometimes forcefully drawn to a socially awkward, doofus accountant played by Will Ferrell. Much to the consternation of his exasperated partner, the more conventionally handsome and masculine Mark Wahlberg, women of all stripes can’t help but, in Wahlberg’s crass terminology, throw “do me vibes” Ferrell’s way. The joke, of course, is that there is absolutely nothing conventionally attractive about Ferrell’s character in either appearance or action.

And, while Alain Guiraudie’s seventh feature, Misericordia (Miséricorde), couldn’t be any more dissimilar from The Other Guys, it does feature a central character whose bland unattractiveness is nevertheless like catnip to every character in the film. This character, Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl), couldn’t be any less interesting if he tried, yet he is somehow the lynchpin that unlocks the repressed sexual desires of the inhabitants of a rural French village, both those who are all too willing to admit it and those who continue to deny it. Floppy-haired, lackadaisical in posture, and with an aging boy face, Jérémie is an enigma from start to finish, and perhaps Guiraudie was hoping that this ambiguity would be enough to carry the film and its increasingly preposterous plot. Alas, it isn’t.

As with many of Guiraudie’s previous films, the story in Misericordia unfolds within a relatively limited location, in this case the fictional village of Saint-Martial and the surrounding Mont Aigoual forest in the South of France. Jérémie, who grew up there but left many years earlier, is returning for the funeral of his mentor, the town baker. As is gradually made clear, Jérémie was in love with the man, although he never let this be known. For reasons that are also largely unknown, the baker’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), invites Jérémie to stay in her home for the funeral and then for an unspecified length of time afterwards, which increasingly enrages her adult son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who feels himself being pushed out by Jérémie’s presence.

Guiraudie immediately establishes sexual frisson between Jérémie and all the other characters: Martine, with whom he shares an affinity for a photo of her husband in a Speedo; Walter (David Ayala), an oafish bear of a man that Jérémie knew as a teenager; and, most directly, the local abbey (Jacques Develay), who flips the script by getting into the other side of the confessional booth to confide in Jérémie his secret desires and knowledge. And then there is Vincent, whose wild-eyed jealousy of Jérémie may derive from some kind of Freudian mama contest or may be born of repressed gay desire that is always threatening to explode every time he and Jérémie get into one of their increasingly violent wrestling matches.

In order to avoid revealing too much, suffice it to say that, by the film’s midpoint, one of the characters is dead and buried in the forest and another character is trying to maintain an increasingly strained alibi that mutates with each telling, especially once two police detectives (Sébastien Faglain and Salomé Lopes) become involved. Guiraudie, who is probably best known (or is most notorious) for his explicit erotic thriller Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac, 2013), laces the drama with thick strains of black humor, which, once compounded, become very nearly farcical by the end, especially when one of the police detectives starts showing up in a character’s bedroom in the middle of the night trying to tease out a slumbering confession.

Guiraudie’s humor runs the gamut, from subtle innuendo, to a ludicrous scene in which Walter throws Jérémie half-naked out of his door and then proceeds to shoot at him with a rifle. As Jérémie, Félix Kysyl is tasked with conveying an enigmatic presence that nevertheless starts to come unwound when the pressure mounts. And, while it is tempting to see him as a variation on Patricia Highsmith’s sociopathic antihero Tom Ripley, he is too boring and seemingly feckless for such comparisons. Whereas Ripley is a devious character whose insecurities drive his violence, Jérémie seems like he simply bumbles into everything that happens to him. It doesn’t help that Guiraudi structures the film around multiple repetitions, including half a dozen scenes in which Jérémie walks into Martine’s house to find one or more people sitting at the kitchen table waiting for him. At some point, you start to wonder how long people sit around waiting for him to arrive on any given day.

Guiraudie drew the plot and characters for Misericordia—which is the Latin word for “mercy” or “compassion” (it literally means “heart for misery”)—from his lengthy novel Rabalaïre, which provides some poignant moments, the most notable involving Jacques Develay’s abbey, who is simultaneously pathetic and the most morally convicted character in the film (he is clearly the one for whom the film’s title is intended). He is written and performed in such a way that I actually wanted to know more about him, even though he also suffers from the plot’s requirement that he show up conveniently whenever he is needed (he does explain at one point he purposefully tries to cross paths with Jérémie regularly). Nevertheless, the film as a whole feels too strained, with the bland Jérémie providing a weak lynchpin that just can’t hold.

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