Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how we work, communicate, and create. With Mercy, the question becomes far more unsettling: what happens when AI is trusted to decide guilt, innocence, and life itself?
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, Mercy is a high-concept thriller that imagines a near future where the criminal justice system has been streamlined into a single, AI-run courtroom. It is a premise is pretty dystopian, and while the film never fully commits to being the definitive cautionary tale it flirts with, it still delivers a surprisingly tense and entertaining experience anchored by a charismatic Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson.
Going in with low expectations proves to be the right mindset, because Mercy, isn’t incredible, but you don’t think you’re going to like it, you might be surprised. Mercy has the unmistakable DNA of a pandemic-era production, limited locations, digital staging, and a heavy reliance on screens. Instead of buckling under those constraints, the film leans into them. Bekmambetov, a longtime champion of screenlife storytelling, some see as being cheap, turns the format into a feature rather than a flaw.
Set in a crime-reduced near-future Los Angeles, the film opens with Detective Chris Raven (Pratt) strapped to a chair inside a sleek, minimalist courtroom. He stands accused of murdering his wife, played in flashbacks by Annabelle Wallis. There is no jury. There are no lawyers. There is only Judge Maddox, an AI-generated entity voiced and embodied with icy goodness by Rebecca Ferguson.
Raven is given 90 minutes to prove his innocence before sentencing is instantly carried out. That sentence, chillingly, is death.
What follows unfolds in real time as Raven navigates his own defense, requesting the AI judge to pull up banking records, social media activity, text messages, surveillance footage, and AI-enhanced data trails belonging to anyone who might be connected to his wife’s death. The countdown clock on screen mirrors the movie’s runtime, a clever trick that keeps tension high. The sound of the clock ticking had the audience acutely aware of every passing second.
Bekmambetov previously produced Searching, and the influence is clear. Like that film, Mercy is visually frenetic, information-heavy, and constantly in motion. Screens stack on screens. Faces appear and disappear. Lives are reduced to searchable data points. Yet the film never feels incomprehensible. Instead, it captures something unsettlingly familiar about modern life, how much of ourselves already exists in digital fragments.
Where Mercy stumbles is in the clarity of its warning. The film positions itself as an Orwellian critique of unchecked AI authority, but the real horror of its justice system has less to do with rogue algorithms and more to do with human design. Any system that shifts the burden of proof entirely onto the defendant, denies them preparation time, legal counsel, and due process, and forces them to defend themselves in under 90 minutes would be a failure of human ethics long before it became an AI problem.
That distinction matters, and Mercy never fully grapples with it. The movie gestures toward the dangers of automation without interrogating who built the system and why such a structure was ever deemed acceptable. The result is a warning that feels broad rather than incisive.
Still, the performances do a lot of heavy lifting. Pratt brings his familiar everyman charm, mixing desperation with stubborn resolve. While the character of Raven is thinly sketched, Pratt’s charisma keeps the emotional stakes intact, even when the script veers into manipulative territory.
Ferguson, meanwhile, is the film’s secret weapon. As Judge Maddox, she delivers a performance that is calm, authoritative, and unnervingly serene. Her AI judge is not overtly villainous. She is simply doing her job, and that emotional detachment makes her presence far more disturbing.
The supporting cast adds texture to the digital maze. Kali Reis plays Raven’s partner with grounded intensity, Chris Sullivan appears as his AA sponsor, and Kylie Rogers brings real emotional weight as Raven’s teenage daughter, whose wavering belief in her father cuts deeper than any algorithmic judgment.
Mercy is no Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and it never reaches that film’s iconic level of technological paranoia. But it does something quieter and more contemporary. It reflects our current relationship with AI, one built less on fear and more on blind trust, convenience, and efficiency.
By the time the credits roll, Mercy lingers more as an experience than a statement. It is slick, tense, and surprisingly effective in the moment, even if its ideas begin to fade soon after leaving the theater. As a piece of screenlife filmmaking, it is confident and engaging. As a societal warning, it only scratches the surface.
Still, in a genre crowded with louder and messier cautionary tales, Mercy earns points for making us think, even briefly, about how much power we are willing to hand over to the machines judging us.
Grade: C+
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