Mercy

The Screen Stares Back: Justice in the Age of Algorithms

It feels like Timur Bekmambetov has lost interest in the physical world entirely. For over a decade, the Russian-Kazakh director has been the most vocal champion of 'screenlife' cinema—those movies like *Unfriended* and *Profile* that take place strictly on computer monitors and smartphones. With *Mercy*, he pushes that obsession into a near-future sci-fi thriller, blending his desktop gimmicks with a standard suspense framework. The result is a messy, cynical, but weirdly compelling experiment about what happens when we outsource our morality to a microprocessor.

The setup is a high-tech pressure cooker in a gritty, rain-blurred 2029 Los Angeles. LAPD Detective Chris Raven wakes up strapped to an execution chair, accused of murdering his wife. He has exactly ninety minutes to prove his innocence to Mercy Court, an automated judicial system he actually helped champion. His only lifeline is access to every surveillance camera, text message, and digital footprint in the city, all projected through AR screens floating right in front of his face.



This scenario traps Chris Pratt in a corner, both literally and as an actor. We’re so used to his kinetic, bouncy charisma—the Star-Lord energy he uses to carry a scene. But here, immobilized and playing a grieving, alcoholic cop, he’s stripped of those usual tools. He has to carry the movie with the tension in his face and the way his eyes dart around while analyzing digital evidence. Watching him swipe at the air with his shoulders slumped is genuinely jarring; it’s one of the few times he’s looked like a vulnerable, broken man rather than a generic action star.

Presiding over his case is Judge Maddox, an AI hologram played by Rebecca Ferguson. She’s a digital head of cold, algorithmic logic, and Ferguson gives a performance of terrifying stillness. She doesn’t blink quite right, and her voice has that frictionless, dead-eyed quality of a chatbot telling you your life is canceled forever. Every time Chris makes a desperate, sweaty plea, Maddox just stares back, calculating the odds.



There’s a specific sequence in the middle of the film that I can’t stop thinking about because it highlights the movie's strange moral logic. Chris is frantically checking his daughter’s Instagram against Ring camera footage to build a timeline. It’s meant to be a warning about AI judgment, but as Alonso Duralde pointed out in *The Film Verdict*, it basically functions as an effective piece of pro-surveillance propaganda. We’re supposed to fear the AI judge, yet we’re invited to cheer for the total surveillance state that lets Chris solve a murder using Amazon footage.

Whether that ideological contradiction is a bug or a feature depends on how much B-movie absurdity you can tolerate. Writing for *The Guardian*, Peter Bradshaw called the central idea 'RoboJustice,' and he’s right to see the pulp roots under the digital gloss. *Mercy* takes its premise seriously for about an hour before the script basically throws in the towel and dives into a frantic, logic-defying third act.



I’m not entirely sure the movie succeeds as the profound warning it wants to be. The dialogue keeps tripping over itself trying to explain what the visuals are already showing, and the editing in the final twenty minutes is so hyperactive that it completely kills the claustrophobic dread of the opening act.

But you have to hand it to Bekmambetov: he understands the modern nervous system. He knows exactly how it feels to stare at a loading bar when you’re desperate for information, or to watch a spinning wheel dictate your immediate future. *Mercy* is a clunky, flawed piece of entertainment, but it leaves you with a cold truth. We’ve already surrendered our lives to these screens; the only difference here is that the screen finally has the power to pull the trigger.