Guiraudie, though, takes Hitchcock’s deadpan sensibility to another level, keeping characters’ motivations and desires ambiguous to us as well as each other, leaving it unclear whether the joke is on us, them or everyone.

However high the stakes, the tone remains strangely equable – as in Alfred Hitchcock’s blackly comic The Trouble With Harry, another autumn movie, where vitality and morbidity are so interwoven it’s impossible to tell them apart.

Misericordia feels like a big metaphysical shrug, sluggish to the point of lethargy.

Disarmingly funny, uniquely suspenseful, and captivatingly amorphous, Misericordia keeps you guessing from first frame to last.