Mercy (2026) emerges as one of the most anticipated science fiction thrillers of the decade, a film that combines the urgency of courtroom drama with the speculative imagination of near-future dystopia.
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian-Kazakh filmmaker best known for Night Watch (2004), Wanted (2008), and his pioneering “Screenlife” format (Unfriended, Searching), the film is written by Marco van Belle, a British screenwriter whose work often blends genre storytelling with philosophical undertones.
Together, they craft a narrative that is both gripping and unsettling, situating audiences in a Los Angeles of 2029 where justice has been automated, and human lives are judged by artificial intelligence.
Imagine you awaken to find yourself strapped into a chair, face to face with a judge who informs you that you’ve been accused of murder— and unless you can exonerate yourself in 90 minutes, you’ll be executed instantly. You have access to every bit of camera footage on the web to prove your case, and you can use that to convince the judge of your innocence. Yet all of that private and public surveillance footage could put you closer to a guilty verdict.
It’s a nightmare scenario. And in the exciting, revolutionary, visually dynamic action thriller Mercy, it takes on future-world overtones as Artificial Intelligence serves as judge, jury and executioner.
In Mercy, it’s the year 2029, and Det. Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) wakes up in that reality. The judge he’s in front of is an artificial intelligence he once championed personified as a human — specifically, the formidable Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson). Raven is a Los Angeles police detective accused of murdering his wife, Nicole (Annabelle Wallis ). As he tries to find scraps of doubt amongst almost 24/7 footage of himself, Maddox decides whether the alibis he’s grasping at are either helpful or harmful to his case. Raven needs to get down to a 92 per cent probability of guilt…yet the closer he creeps up to 98 per cent guilt, the more likely it is he’ll be executed on the spot in what is known as the Mercy Chair.
Predicting The Ethics And Visuals Of AI
Mercy screenwriter Marco van Belle explains that he melded old and new ideas for his forward-thinking script — and then watched as real life caught up with this kinetic mystery thriller.
“I was researching predictions for scientific and technological advancements in the near future when I found articles mentioning the possible application of AI in justice systems,” says van Belle. “When I found a news report about an AI judge being created in Estonia to handle decision-making in civil cases, I realized these were being actively developed with the intent to deploy them. I saw the incredible potential to reinvigorate the legal thriller/courtroom drama genre by framing a trial within an AI court.”
“The idea to focus the story on a capital-punishment trial came quickly, because this was a way to inject life-and-death stakes,” van Belle continues. “The capital court system also felt like a believable candidate for the incorporation of AI as a safeguard against human error, given that there has been very public criticism of miscarriages of justice in death penalty cases over the years. So I made it a high-stakes story that felt like it could believably incorporate AI without stretching the bounds of narrative credibility.”
To render the ideas behind Mercy as truthfully as possible, early on the filmmakers sent Marco Van Belle’s script to an expert in AI ethics for feedback and to see if its ideas held weight.
Benjamin Boudreaux is a policy researcher at the Rand School for Social Science and a former advisor to the Obama Administration on International Technology Diplomacy who helped advise the MERCY filmmakers about the emerging ethics of Artificial Intelligence. The story, Boudreaux says, addresses in a thriller format some of the work AI experts are grappling with.
“The general concept of looking towards AI and data analysis tools to improve criminal justice — as well as to predict crime, determine guilt, and assess a threat or risk to society — is right now actively going on in police departments around the country,” says Boudreaux. “New types of data analysis tools are things that AI tools can make much faster and more effective.”
Boudreaux says that, just as in Mercy, AI is assumed to have less biases than human beings. “The use of AI in legal systems is also about trying to get around issues like, for instance, that judges are grumpier before lunch and so might sentence a person more harshly at that time,” says Boudreaux. “Humans are certainly fallible and biased. So the promise — or the proposal — of using AI tools is that they will diminish this type of human inconsistency and make more data-driven decisions.”
The Excitement And Promise Of Screenlife
The history of the movies has been about watching the narrative form evolve. With his Screenlife films, director Timur Bekmambetov has created the 21st century’s true merging of cinema and interactive technology in Unfriended (2015), Searching (2018), and Profile (2021). Mercy takes another leap — one that the theatre experience and exhilaration of the big screen make a high-powered viewing event.
The film’s commercial and audience-pleasing high points are anchored in the story’s reflecting the moment in which it was made. “The Screenlife genre requires believable performances and very grounded storytelling,” says Bekmambetov. “When I began Mercy, I thought, ‘In real life I live in two realities at once — the physical world, and a world of windows, buttons, clicks, messages. I work, I fight with people, forgive people, all not in the physical world. So why are we are not telling stories about that?’”
“I thought of a genre in which the story is happening 100 percent, or mostly, onscreen,” continues Bekmambetov. “That was, of course, a very extreme approach. But it was interesting for me to provoke screenwriters and myself to refuse traditional film language and to try and tell stories using a language we never spoke before. I said, We should see the screen of the protagonist and it should be in real time. We need to believe that we’re with them. And that became Unfriended. And I saw that our idea worked. And then we made Searching, and then Profile.”
“Every film is different because a director alters the cinematic language every time,” says Bekmambetov. “Screenlife needs different camerawork because in Screenlife, the camera is a character — often from phone or computer images. But we have to make decisions like, where to put the camera? I want to point the camera in a different direction because it’ll look real. But ultimately, the story must be engaging, and the characters relatable, as in any movie. This is just a new way to present a story.”
The film is brought to wildly vibrant life by visionary filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov
Bekmambetov is renowend for directing Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and Ben-Hur , his groundbreaking films Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006) were wildly influential, and whose films using his unique Screenlife style and format — Unfriended (2015), Searching (2018), and Profile (2021) — moved cinema forward into integrating aspects of the digital world as cutting-edge visual technology is represented narratively on the big screen.
“Mercy is a very intense, thrilling mystery, a new approach to the Screenlife language with a very entertaining, serious, impactful subject,” says Bekmambetov. “I loved this story not just as a Screenlife movie, but as a traditional movie. It involves how we behave and interact with technology.”
“This is a suspense thriller with a bit of science-fiction to it, though it could become science reality,” says Academy Award-winning producer Charles Roven (Oppenheimer, Wonder Woman, American Hustle, The Dark Knight, Batman Begins). “Our world is constantly coming to grips with innovations, and AI is one of them. It’s good or bad, depending on how we use it.”
Roven explains how the Screenlife technology the film utilises makes the film’s storytelling as cutting-edge as its conceit: “The most complicated part of the movie was designing and placing the multiple imagery in each scene, or in many of the shots. That was a process I had never done before, even though I’ve done many movies with lots of visual effects in them that were complicated on an individual-shot basis. However, I’ve never done one that utilises so many different single shots in one image, the way Mercy does. And the different images and screens help audiences understand what Chris Raven has gone through, giving us details about how he got to where he is when the film opens.”
“When I first read this script, it blew my mind,” says producer Robert Amidon (TV’s What/If and Triple Frontier). “It had such a fresh concept. And today, it’s amazing where we are with technology and the advancements in AI and how that lines up with this movie.”
“Timur Bekmambetov has the biggest passion for the digital world and where it is today,” adds Amidon. “The concept in Mercy aligned with his previous films Missing, Searching, and Profile. And like those, this story that was set in 2029 was grounded in reality while going into different genres.”
Says producer Majd Nassif (Locked, Profile), “MERCY is not simply a Screenlife movie — it has elements of the Screenlife format with a hybrid approach. What excites Timur most is any new challenge; he’ll so often say, ‘Let’s try something that’s never been done before. Let’s try new technology.’ That has always been an ongoing conversation over all the years I’ve worked with him.”
With the AI Judge Maddox, MERCY adds a compelling new characterization to cinema’s gallery of morally ambiguous and potentially malevolent computer personas.
The inspiration behind Mercy lies in the intersection of technological innovation and moral anxiety
Bekmambetov has long been fascinated by the ways digital systems reshape human experience, and here he extends that vision into the realm of justice. In interviews, he has emphasized that the film explores “artificial intelligence, justice, and morality in a near-future world”.
The idea of an AI judge is not merely speculative fantasy; it reflects real-world debates about algorithmic decision-making in law enforcement, sentencing, and surveillance. As societies increasingly rely on predictive policing, facial recognition, and automated systems, the question arises: can machines truly embody justice, or do they strip it of empathy and mercy?
Marco van Belle’s script dramatizes this dilemma by placing Raven in a cruel irony—he must defend himself before the very system he once advocated, a system designed to eliminate human bias but incapable of understanding human grief, doubt, and fallibility. The ticking clock intensifies this tension, transforming the trial into a thriller while underscoring the existential stakes of delegating moral authority to machines.
The film’s significance is manifold
On one level, it represents a bold fusion of genres: courtroom drama, cyber-thriller, and speculative science fiction. By compressing the trial into ninety minutes, Mercy achieves a real-time urgency reminiscent of High Noon or Phone Booth, while embedding it in a futuristic context that recalls Minority Report and Ex Machina. This hybridization is emblematic of Bekmambetov’s style, which often pushes genre boundaries to reflect contemporary anxieties.
On another level, the film resonates culturally as a parable about the dangers of technological determinism. In a world increasingly governed by algorithms, Mercy dramatizes the loss of human compassion in systems designed for efficiency. The very title—Mercy—becomes ironic, as the AI judge embodies logic without empathy, a justice stripped of its human core. Raven’s struggle is not only to prove his innocence but to reclaim the possibility of mercy in a system that denies it.
The casting further amplifies the film’s significance
Chris Pratt, often associated with blockbuster franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World, takes on a more serious, high-stakes role as Detective Raven, embodying both vulnerability and resilience. Rebecca Ferguson, acclaimed for her performances in Dune and Mission: Impossible, plays Judge Maddox, the AI whose cold rationality contrasts with Raven’s emotional desperation. Their dynamic encapsulates the film’s central tension: human fallibility versus machine logic. Supporting performances by Annabelle Wallis, Kali Reis, Chris Sullivan, Kenneth Choi, and Kylie Rogers enrich the narrative, grounding the futuristic premise in relatable human relationships—family, loyalty, betrayal.
From a production standpoint, Mercy also reflects the evolving landscape of cinema
Produced by Atlas Entertainment and Bazelevs Company, and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios, it exemplifies the convergence of traditional filmmaking with streaming-era distribution. Scheduled for release in IMAX and 3D on January 23, 2026, the film positions itself as both a spectacle and a philosophical provocation, aiming to capture audiences in theatres while sparking debates about technology and justice. Bekmambetov’s visual style, known for kinetic energy and digital experimentation, promises to render the courtroom not as a static space but as a dynamic arena where human and machine confront one another in visceral ways.
Thematically, Mercy resonates with mythic and psychological motifs
Raven’s ordeal mirrors the archetypal hero’s trial, a descent into confrontation with forces larger than himself. The AI judge functions as a modern oracle, dispensing verdicts without compassion, embodying the cold inevitability of fate. The ninety-minute countdown evokes the ritual of reckoning, a compressed journey from accusation to potential redemption. In this sense, the film operates not only as a thriller but as a contemporary myth, dramatizing humanity’s confrontation with its own creations. The trial becomes a ritual of meaning, a symbolic confrontation between human vulnerability and technological determinism.
In conclusion, Mercy (2026), directed by Timur Bekmambetov and written by Marco van Belle, is a film of both narrative urgency and philosophical depth. Inspired by contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and justice, it dramatises a near-future trial where a detective must prove his innocence before an AI judge.
Its significance lies in its fusion of genres, its cultural resonance, and its thematic exploration of mercy, morality, and human fallibility. By situating audiences in a world where justice is automated and empathy is absent, Mercy compels us to confront the limits of technology and the enduring need for human compassion.
Whether embraced as a gripping thriller or critiqued as a cautionary tale, it stands as a cinematic reflection of our time, a story that asks not only whether machines can judge us, but whether we can survive in a world where mercy itself is mechanised.
Marco van Belle (Writer)
Marco van Belle began his career as a journalist at the BBC, where he picked up awards for his work in television news. After more than a decade in front of the camera, he moved behind it to direct several successful short films, before turning his focus to writing screenplays – a move that immediately saw him voted onto the Tracking Board’s annual ‘Young and Hungry’ list of emerging writers in Hollywood. Ever since then, he has enjoyed a busy career as a screenwriter and director, working with studios and producers on both sides of the Atlantic. He now writes from his native Ireland while wrangling a hyperactive Jack Russell Terrier.
Timur Bekmambetov (Director/Producer)
Timur Bekmambetov is an acclaimed Hollywood filmmaker and producer, known for creating technologically innovative and visually arresting genre films.
His directorial debut in Hollywood was Marc Millar’s comic book adaptation WANTED (2008) which starred Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy. The action film grossed $341 million, earned two Oscar nominations. Bekmambetov’s new film as a director is sci-fi thriller MERCY for Amazon MGM Studios, starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, which he also produced alongside Oscar-winning producer Charles Roven (OPPENHEIMER).
Bekmambetov is the pioneer of screenlife films in which the action is set from the point of view of smartphone and computer screens as characters utilize their devices that drive the narrative forward. His debut screenlife production – a teen horror pic UNFRIENDED (2015) went on to gross more than $65 million against a budget of $1 million. His next screenlife production, SEARCHING (2018) starring John Cho, became a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival, grossing over $75 million. This film has also spawned sequel MISSING (2023) starring Emmy-winning Storm Reid that grossed $48.8 million and topped Netflix US movie chart. His latest screenlife production – the digital heist film LIFEHACK (2025) – premiered this March at SXSW and received a sensational 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
