Cast: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson
Genre: Action, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Director: Timur Bekmambetov
In Irish Cinemas: 23rd January 2026
Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy imagines a near future in which justice has been streamlined into a 90-minute countdown, and guilt is the default setting. Framed as a high-speed, screen-based thriller, the film traps a murder suspect in a digital courtroom run by an AI judge who will execute him if he fails to clear his name before time expires. It’s an attention-grabbing hook, but Mercy ultimately proves that a clever premise is meaningless if it’s handled with all the care of a beta test rushed to market. For all its ambition, the film collapses under its own clutter, delivering a frantic barrage of ideas that never cohere.
The movie’s opening gambit is immediately odd: instead of immersing us naturally in its world, Mercy begins with a glossy recap reel explaining how Los Angeles, circa 2029, devolved into such chaos that AI-run executions became the preferred solution. This montage, absurdly, is being played to Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt), the very man who helped design the system now preparing to kill him. Raven awakens alone in a cavernous chamber, strapped into a mechanised chair that will deliver a lethal shock unless he can disprove the charge that he murdered his wife, Nicole (Anabelle Wallis), earlier that day.
Hovering before him on a massive screen is Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), a faceless digital authority who declares Raven “guilty until proven innocent.” The legal framework is intentionally tilted toward efficiency over fairness, and in theory, that imbalance could have been fertile dramatic ground. Maddox has unrestricted access to the city’s total data stream texts, GPS pings, security cameras, and biometric records, while Raven is allowed to comb through the same archive to build his defence. Visualised as floating windows and holographic interfaces erupting around his head, the evidence assembles itself into a damning narrative: Raven left work unexpectedly, argued with Nicole at home, departed again, and minutes later their teenage daughter Britt (Kylie Rogers) discovered her mother stabbed to death.
Complicating matters is Raven’s complete lack of memory of these events, a potentially rich mystery device that the film introduces only to abandon almost immediately. From there, Mercy accelerates into overdrive, piling on FaceTime calls, digital witnesses, and secondary characters at such speed that nothing is allowed to breathe. Raven’s partner Jaq Dialo (Kali Reis), his AA sponsor (Chris Sullivan), and a rotating cast of plot facilitators flood the screen, each delivering exposition just moments before it becomes relevant or redundant. Clues are explained at the exact moment they appear, robbing the mystery of any tension or satisfaction.
The film then commits to a visual strategy that borders on sensory assault. Raven remotely directs Jaq through the investigation, hopping between her body cam, police drones, simulated reconstructions, and abstract digital overlays in rapid succession. Just as the audience begins to orient itself, the film shifts again into a tech-paranoia thriller, then a domestic tragedy, then an ill-defined conspiracy involving drugs and terrorism. None of these threads is developed enough to matter. Instead, the movie becomes a constant exercise in visual whiplash, with overlapping windows competing for attention across multiple focal planes.
What’s most unsettling about Mercy, though, isn’t its chaos, it’s its ideological emptiness. The film depicts a surveillance state with total informational control over its citizens, yet treats this omnipresence as morally neutral background noise. The AI justice system is brutally authoritarian in function, but the movie never meaningfully interrogates the ethics of delegating life-and-death decisions to an algorithm. Instead, it quietly nudges the viewer toward the conclusion that the system itself is sound, and that the only real danger lies in bad actors exploiting it. Given how fascistic Maddox’s authority appears, this implicit endorsement feels deeply tone-deaf.
This is especially disappointing considering Bekmambetov’s long association with the screenlife format. From early webcam-era experiments to Unfriended, Searching, and other productions, he has demonstrated a keen understanding of how narrative constraints can generate tension and intimacy. Screenlife thrives on limitation, on the careful choreography of what can and cannot be seen. Mercy, by contrast, explodes those boundaries until the format loses its identity altogether. Instead of deepening engagement, the constant visual expansion dilutes it.
Ironically, the film spends so much time lingering on Raven’s face, often in aggressive, unflattering close-ups, that the supposed point-of-view conceit feels secondary. As Raven is gradually revealed to be an abrasive cop and an emotionally negligent husband, the film never grapples with whether he deserves our empathy. Pratt struggles to infuse the role with nuance or gravitas, leaving Raven as a protagonist whose survival feels more procedural than urgent. Ferguson’s AI judge, meanwhile, registers as the most composed and “human” presence on screen, an unintentionally perverse outcome that the film seems unaware of.
When Mercy finally abandons its single-room structure in the final act, the confusion only deepens. Perspective becomes muddled, action scenes fracture into too many competing feeds, and the film’s already inconsistent tone unravels completely. The notion of extending screenlife into the physical space, forcing a character to navigate a world constructed from data, is a compelling idea. But Mercy treats that idea as a novelty rather than a thematic engine, introducing it and discarding it without reflection.
In a setting this extreme, a story demands moral friction: a protagonist forced to confront his role in building a system that now condemns him, and to reckon with culpability, power, and technological hubris. Mercy wants none of that. Instead, it appears enamoured with the very mechanisms it gestures toward criticising, presenting a future where invasive surveillance and automated executions are efficient, desirable, and only occasionally inconvenient.
At times, it feels as though the screenlife format itself is working against the material. The film’s most invasive visual techniques could have underscored themes of lost privacy and coerced transparency, but they’re deployed primarily for spectacle. The result is a dystopia that’s shot like a showroom, sleek, polished, and strangely aspirational. If the future on display here is meant to be horrifying, the film does a poor job of showing it.
In the end, Mercy doesn’t just strap Chris Pratt into an execution chair; it locks the audience there with him. What could have been a sharp sci-fi thriller about the perils of algorithmic justice instead plays like a glossy pitch deck for unchecked technological authority. The film’s true chill comes not from its story, but from how enthusiastically it seems to accept the world it portrays.
Overall: 6/10
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