- UK release: January 2026
- Director: Timur Bekmambetov · Writer: Marco van Belle
- Studio / distributor: Amazon MGM Studios; Atlas Entertainment; Bazelevs
- Genre: Science fiction crime thriller / AI courtroom drama · Runtime: 100 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Tomorrow War) as Detective Chris Raven; Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Silo) as the AI judge Maddox; Kali Reis (True Detective: Night Country) as the investigator; Annabelle Wallis (Peaky Blinders, Malignant) as the witness closest to the case
- IMDb: 6.1 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 24% critics / 82% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Timur Bekmambetov made his name on the kinetic excess of Wanted and then spent the next decade quietly inventing a format, the screenlife film, where the whole story plays out on screens, cameras and feeds. He produced Searching and Unfriended on that principle, and Mercy is where he scales the idea up to a star vehicle and a near-future justice system. The pitch is Minority Report with the gloss stripped off: a world that has handed criminal trials to an artificial intelligence, and a man on the wrong side of its verdict with the clock running. It is a premise built for the things I tend to enjoy, and the question is whether the execution keeps pace with the idea.
The setup
Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) is arrested for the murder of his wife and brought before Maddox, the AI judicial authority that now decides guilt and sentence in a single sitting. The system promises speed and impartiality, which in practice means Raven has a fixed and very short window to overturn the case against him using the same surveillance record the court is using to convict him. He is both the accused and, by necessity, his own investigator, sifting bodycam footage, call logs and camera feeds for the detail the machine has weighted wrongly. The film keeps the stakes tight and personal: prove it now, in this room, against a counsel that does not blink, or be sentenced before the night is out.
The cast
Pratt plays against type, and it suits the film. The wisecracking charm that carries his franchise work is dialled almost all the way down, leaving a cornered man who is tired, frightened and not always sympathetic. It is a more restrained performance than he usually gives, and while it will disappoint anyone arriving for the Guardians register, it is the right call for a character who spends the runtime trying to out-argue a computer. The film belongs, though, to Rebecca Ferguson. As Maddox she is calm, exact and entirely without malice, which makes her far more unnerving than a human prosecutor would be. Ferguson has always been good at controlled authority, and here she weaponises stillness; the machine never raises its voice because it never needs to. Kali Reis brings a welcome human counterweight as the investigator working the case from outside the system, and Annabelle Wallis supplies the personal stakes that stop the whole thing collapsing into procedure.
The craft
This is a screenlife film, and your tolerance for that will shape the experience. Bekmambetov and cinematographer Khalid Mohtaseb stage almost everything through the apparatus of the surveillance state: interface windows, camera angles, evidence playback, the cold geometry of a courtroom that is really a server. When it works, the format does something a conventional thriller cannot, it makes the audience complicit in the same act of watching that has trapped the hero, and the surveillance theme stops being decoration and becomes the texture of the film. When it does not work, the screens can feel airless and the eye gets tired of the frame within the frame. Lorne Balfe’s score does a lot to keep the tension wound, all low pulses and rising dread, and Austin Keeling’s editing holds the real-time conceit together better than its critics give it credit for. At a lean hundred minutes it does not outstay its welcome.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Minority Report, and Mercy shares its central worry: a justice system confident enough in its own prediction to act before the defence has finished speaking. Where Spielberg’s film had the budget for spectacle, this one trades down to the claustrophobia of The Guilty, the single-location pressure cooker where one person works a crisis through the equipment in front of them. It sits in the same conversation as Searching, Bekmambetov’s own production, and the surveillance anxiety that British television has been mining in The Capture. None of those reference points are accidental; Mercy knows exactly which shelf it belongs on, and it earns its place there more through idea and discipline than through novelty.
Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is stark. Critics have been harsh, sitting around 24%, with the screenlife format dismissed as a gimmick and the premise called derivative. Audiences land at 82%, and the gap tells you something. The critical objection is fair on its own terms: yes, the idea is borrowed, and yes, the format will not convert anyone who finds it a migraine of windows and feeds. But the reviewers complaining that the characters seem unaware of better films in the genre have rather missed that the film is in deliberate dialogue with those films, not ignorant of them. Audiences responding to a taut, twist-driven thriller about justice in an automated world are, on this occasion, closer to what the film is actually doing.
Verdict
I come down nearer the audience than the critics, and not by accident. This is exactly my territory: surveillance, an AI that decides who lives free, a procedural investigation run in real time by the person with the most to lose. Ferguson is genuinely chilling, the world-building is sharp and economical, and the screenlife approach, for all its limits, makes the technology feel like a threat rather than a backdrop. It is not flawless. Pratt’s restraint occasionally tips into flatness, and the format will lose a portion of the audience inside ten minutes. But it is tense, it is clever about the thing it is worried about, and I would happily watch it again to catch the evidence I missed the first time. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now from 23 January, including IMAX and 3D screenings. A streaming release on Prime Video is expected to follow.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: after a soft theatrical run Mercy found a far larger audience on Prime Video, where it became one of the platform’s most-watched titles and confirmed the gap between the cool critical reception and the strong public response noted above. It is now streaming on Prime Video, with a disc release also available for the screenlife collectors.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat, injury detail, drug misuse, strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Scenes include shootings, explosions, beatings, clashes between police and civilians, and a scene in which a man is trapped between two colliding vehicles. Verbal references are made to a woman’s murder.
Threat and horror: A man grapples with his impending execution while being held captive by an AI judge. Other suspenseful sequences include high speed vehicle chases, people being held at gunpoint and allusions to a woman murdered inside her home.
Injury detail: A woman is discovered dead in her home after being stabbed; the crime scene is depicted in bodycam footage and photographs, which include bloody detail.
Language: Strong language (‘f***k’) is used infrequently; milder terms include ‘bitch’, ‘ass’, ‘shit’, ‘hell’, ‘God’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’ and ‘damn’. The middle finger gesture also features.
Drugs: Occasional scenes of joint smoking; other drug references include depictions of crystal meth being prepared for distribution.
Sex: Verbal references to an adulterous relationship.
Theme: Upsetting scenes relate to bereavement.
Alcohol and smoking: People are seen smoking and drinking alcohol, on occasion to excess.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
