Against The Clock
Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson go head-to-head in a super-charged suspense thriller where AI is judge, jury, and executioner.
Words Jim Roberts
Step into 2029 Los Angeles, a city governed by a powerful artificial intelligence justice system. Homicide detective Chris Raven, played by Chris Pratt, is accused of a crime he insists he didn’t commit: his wife’s murder. Dragged before Judge Maddox, the ultra-sophisticated AI being he helped design, he’s given ninety minutes to prove his innocence or face a death sentence.
From action veteran Timur Bekmambetov, Mercy blends high-concept sci-fi fused with the grit of a police procedural. Pratt sets aside his usual disarming charm for a raw, desperate fight to survive. Forced to gather his own evidence, Raven scours memories, CCTV archives, and digital traces – each discovery drawing him closer to a deeper conspiracy.
Rebecca Ferguson commands as the Big Brother-like judge, a chillingly precise arbiter of justice programmed for zero error. Zero bias. Zero compassion. But when glimpses of empathy and doubt emerge, it becomes clear: even she may be vulnerable to forces beyond her control.
With its relentless tension and unsettling ideas, Mercy is one of the most provocative explorations of AI yet. Questions loom large: Can truth be programmed? Would you trust a machine with justice? And when the system becomes judge, jury, and executioner, will it show Mercy?
Onscreenlife
Building on the Screenlife technique he helped pioneer in Searching and Unfriended, Bekmambetov tells Mercy almost entirely through digital screens. The story unfolds in real time, within the confines of an interrogation chamber where the clock ticks intensely. To escape his virtual prison, Raven must navigate a maze of video calls, text threads, social media feeds, and surveillance footage. Traditional scenes give way to a fully immersive digital landscape, where the screen itself becomes a living, watching presence. The result is a film that blurs the boundary between human and machine, reality and data, truth and lies. Mercy is immediate, claustrophobic, and disturbingly plausible, putting you into the shoes – and mind – of a man racing against both time and the code.
