There is a particular cruelty to a mind unravelling in slow motion. It strips not just facts and faces but the very architecture of self , the ability to know, in any given moment, who you are and what you are capable of. For most people, that dissolution is a private tragedy. For Angelo Doyle, contract killer, loving father, and grandfather-to-be, it is an existential catastrophe of the highest order. The secret that Alzheimer’s threatens to erase is not just his identity. It is the wall between his daughter’s life and his career in murder.

Memory of a Killer is an American crime drama television series created by Ed Whitmore and Tracey Malone that premiered on Fox on January 25, 2026. It is based on the 2003 Belgian film De Zaak Alzheimer and the 1985 novel of the same name. Angelo Doyle is a contract killer and family man struggling to keep his two lives separate. His worlds begin to collide when an attempt is made on his pregnant daughter’s life. Angelo often visits his Alzheimer’s-ridden brother in a memory care facility, while there are signs that the disease is starting to affect Angelo as well.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds a 50% approval rating based on 12 critic reviews. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 58 out of 100 based on 9 critics, indicating “mixed or average” reviews.

Those scores tell a story of a show perpetually at war with itself , ambitious premise, pedestrian execution, and occasional flashes of genuine power that remind you what this series could have been if it had committed fully to its own darkest instincts. What keeps it watchable, and what keeps it stuck, are often the same things.

De Zaak Alzheimer and the Road to Fox

The source material , a Belgian noir novel by Jef Geeraerts published in 1985, adapted into a critically acclaimed film in 2003 , is one of European crime fiction’s most psychologically unnerving premises. An aging hitman, already watching his brother disappear into dementia’s fog, recognising the same symptoms in himself.

A final assignment that becomes a race against his own dissolving mind. The Belgian film is celebrated precisely for its refusal to sentimentalise the concept. The disease is not redemption. It is annihilation and the tragedy is that it comes for both the guilty and the innocent with equal indifference.

The American adaptation has a more complicated production history. On November 10, 2025, the original showrunners Schulner, Whitmore, and Malone stepped down and were replaced by Aaron Zelman and Glenn Kessler.

That mid-development upheaval left fingerprints on the finished product. The tonal inconsistency that critics have noted , the series frequently unsure whether it wants to be prestige drama or procedural thriller feels less like creative ambiguity and more like the seam where two different visions were stitched together mid-production.

It was recently adapted into the dismally awful Liam Neeson vehicle Memory, one of the lesser films from a star who sometimes makes questionable choices.

The Fox series is unquestionably the superior interpretation more patient, more structurally ambitious, more interested in the human cost of the premise. But the comparison to that film is less a compliment than a low bar cleared.

The Cast: Two Worlds, One Fracturing Man

Patrick Dempsey as Angelo Doyle/Angelo Flannery : Angelo lives two totally separate lives fearsome NYC hitman, and sleepy upstate Cooperstown photocopier salesman and father. Having built and maintained a brick wall between his two worlds, Angelo has seamlessly juggled and compartmentalized for years.

But now that’s all about to change, because Alzheimer’s is a foe he can’t outrun, and he knows too well how this ends, as his older brother is already lost to the condition.

For viewers whose primary reference for Dempsey is Derek Shepherd , the beatific neurosurgeon of a decade and a half of primetime sentiment , the adjustment is jarring and intentional. This Angelo is cold in the places that his Grey’s Anatomy persona was warm, and his warmth is deployed sparingly, reserved for Maria and for the visits to his brother that function as the show’s emotional north star.

Patrick Dempsey delivers a very layered performance. Angelo is methodical, frighteningly calm, and deeply exhausted.

The problem, noted by critics across the spectrum, is that Dempsey’s chosen register , controlled, inexpressive, professionally blank begins to read as limitation rather than characterisation. The wall Angelo has built to separate his lives becomes the wall between performance and audience. You watch him, but you are not always inside him.

And for a series whose entire premise depends on us sharing his terror at a mind beginning to slip, that distance is a structural problem.

Michael Imperioli as Dutch Forlanni : The man who gives Angelo his assignments, and that man’s nephew who serves as Angelo’s right-hand man.

Imperioli brings a weight of ambiguity to Dutch that the role requires and that the writing only intermittently supports. Angelo and Dutch do seem to just like each other. They have an affinity for each other, a long history but they have trust issues with each other, and the question is whether or not a relationship like that can survive those trust issues.

Watching Imperioli in scenes with Dempsey, you feel the accumulated texture of a long and morally compromised friendship , men who have done unspeakable things together and built genuine affection in the gaps between the violence. It is the series’ most interesting relationship and its most underwritten.

Odeya Rush as Maria Kahn : Angelo’s pregnant daughter carries the show’s emotional stakes. Her arc across the season from victim of the shooting to active, refusal-to-be-passive investigator is the series’ most satisfying character progression.

Maria quietly reclaims her agency. Her decision to go to the gun range, to push Dave for answers, and eventually to investigate the hiking trail herself shows a woman unwilling to wait for safety to be handed to her.

The show’s critics have been divided on Rush’s performance , some finding her unconvincing, others seeing genuine depth but the writing around Maria consistently gives her more structural purpose than her father’s storyline deserves.

Gina Torres as FBI Agent Linda Grant : If this show does end up working, the arrival of the great Gina Torres as the cop who starts to sniff around Angelo’s life will likely be one of the main reasons.

Grant operates as the series’ external conscience , methodical where Angelo is reactive, institutional where he is criminal, and yet drawn to him in ways that complicate her professional clarity. Torres brings a quality to the role that the show consistently fails to capitalise on fully, appearing too infrequently to drive the tension her character promises.

Richard Harmon as Joe Ferrara : Dutch’s nephew and Angelo’s increasingly compromised partner-in-crime. Joe is paired with Angelo to keep tabs on him, but his incompetence consistently forces Angelo to compensate.

Harmon plays Joe’s mix of eagerness, inadequacy, and hidden depths with genuine conviction. Their partnership . the seasoned professional saddled with the untested nephew, the hitman whose own mind is becoming unreliable paired with a handler whose reliability is in question is the show’s most dramatically productive relationship.

Episode By Episode Recap

Episode 1 : “My Return”

The premiere efficiently constructs the dual architecture of Angelo’s existence. In the opening minutes, we watch him take out a target with terrifying precision , cold-blooded efficiency that stands in jarring contrast to the scene that follows: Angelo sitting in an OBGYN office with Maria, smiling at an ultrasound of his first grandchild.

That juxtaposition is the show’s central image, and it is executed with enough craft to make the tonal dissonance feel purposeful rather than accidental.

The premiere establishes two ticking clocks: the drunk driver who killed Angelo’s wife is being released from prison , reintroducing his past into his present; and a mysterious hitman is closing in on Angelo himself. The episode ends on that second threat , a shadow converging, a professional hunting the professional. Memory of a Killer’s pilot is a fantastic start to the season; it’s violent and emotional in equal measures.

Watching Angelo lose his mind while trying to settle his old debts is a ticking clock that feels much more urgent than your standard police procedural.

Episode 2 : “Ferryman”

Maria is shot not killed, but targeted with lethal intent.

The attack is a declaration: someone knows enough about Angelo’s life to reach through the wall he has spent years constructing. Angelo learns the name “the Ferryman” from both the hitman who took the shot and the man who killed his wife. This name triggers Angelo’s protective instincts, prompting him to launch a parallel investigation outside official channels.

The mythological resonance is made explicit. The showrunner confirmed it , the Greek mythology reference to Charon, the ferryman of souls to the underworld, is a very compelling metaphor that will be explored and explained throughout the season.

What does it mean that somebody goes by the name of this figure in Greek mythology, and what do they represent?

The answer is layered. The Ferryman doesn’t just kill , he transports. He moves people from one state of existence to another: from life to death, from safety to exposure, from certainty to the void. He is, in this reading, a mirror of Angelo’s disease. Alzheimer’s is its own ferryman conducting the self, piece by piece, across a river it cannot return from.

A crucial secondary development: Angelo leaves a news clipping about a target in the wrong jacket. Maria finds it. Neither confirms to the other that they know what the other knows. Showrunner Aaron Zelman: “We like to leave things up to the audience to decide. We don’t think Maria has put all of it together yet but certainly the question of what she suspects is one the season will answer.”

Episode 3 : “Samurai”

Dutch orders Angelo to kill an Internal Affairs agent threatening their operation.

The assignment is a perfect crystallisation of the show’s ethical architecture: Angelo is asked to murder a law enforcement officer who is, functionally, doing exactly what law enforcement should do.

The corruption being exposed is real. The agent seeking to expose it is right. And Angelo’s job is to ensure that rightness never reaches daylight.

“Samurai” is sharp. It’s an episode about fathers failing their children, about systems that rot from the inside, and about how violence doesn’t just destroy bodies , it corrodes identity. By the final moments, Angelo isn’t running from who he is anymore. He’s hunting the truth, even if it leads him straight into the river.

Episode 4 : “Unhappy Ending”

The episode that critics have most consistently praised as the season’s high-water mark. Angelo tracks down Leo a henchman with Ferryman connections and extracts nothing useful before killing him. But the killing yields a discovery more disturbing than any confession: at a warehouse linked to the Ferryman’s men, he discovers surveillance photos of his entire family.

This proves that the Ferryman has been watching them closely. This isn’t business. It’s personal.

The Alzheimer’s subplot crystallises in a moment of devastating simplicity. Angelo apologizes to Jeff for not setting up the baby’s crib, only for Jeff to gently remind him that he already did it.

That small, domestic failure , forgetting a crib assembled with his own hands is more frightening than any of the episode’s violence. It is the disease announcing itself in language Angelo cannot deflect with competence or brutality.

And then the episode’s final sucker punch: Angelo calls one of the numbers from Leo’s phone, and to his surprise, Nicky answers suggesting that Nicky is somehow connected to Leo. Maybe she’s a helper, someone being used, or made to work for the Ferryman.

Not every ending is meant to satisfy. Some are meant to warn you that the worst is still coming.

Episodes 5-6 : “Samurai” / “Uncle Jacob”

Angelo’s complex relationship with his brother Michael is explored: in order to save his own life, Angelo framed Dutch’s own brother and killed him. Furthermore, Angelo had Michael admitted to psychiatric care in exchange for Dutch sparing his life.

This revelation retroactively colours every visit Angelo has made to his brother in the memory care facility. His guilt is not just the ambient guilt of a man who has done terrible things. It is specific, contractual, and intimate. His brother’s dissolution is, in a real sense, the price Angelo paid for his own survival.

A visit to a psychiatrist confirms that, like his brother Michael, Angelo too has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. While the doctor provides some meds to delay the rapid mental degradation, he advises keeping a support system , someone with whom he can confide, preferably his daughter.

Needless to say, this is an impossible proposition given the kind of life Angelo leads.

The Nicky situation is addressed through an elaborate trap: Angelo brings Nicky to his NY apartment and sets a trap by letting her overhear a fake conversation where he mentions his plan of apprehending the Ferryman at a specific location at a specific time.

If his suspicions are not misplaced, Nicky is going to inform the Ferryman about the conversation. However, as no one arrives at the location Angelo had mentioned, it appears Nicky is in the clear for now.

Episode 7 : “Dr. Parks”

Angelo learns that a previous job may be the key to unmasking the Ferryman. Meanwhile, Dave has a big break in his investigation that could expose Angelo’s true identity.

The episode title refers to Dr. Robert Parks , a name that has appeared in Angelo’s earlier recollections whose murder five years prior is increasingly central to understanding the Ferryman’s motivation. The flashback structure that drives the episode is the season’s most formally ambitious moment: a hitman with dementia reconstructing the past through fragments, unsure which memories are accurate and which are constructed.

The opening flashback to Robert Parks’ murder immediately frames the episode around consequences. This is not a job that stays buried. Every kill echoes, and now those echoes are aimed directly at his daughter.

Who Was The Ferryman

By the midpoint of the season, the Ferryman has been established less as a character than as a gravitational force , someone who moves through Angelo’s world with godlike foreknowledge, who has been monitoring his family for months or years, and whose hatred is rooted not in Angelo’s criminal career but in something specific and personal.

The Ferryman is positioned as a calculated, vengeful force in the criminal underworld. The mythological reference to Charon , the ferryman of souls to the afterlife serves as a metaphor for death, transition, and Angelo’s own fading memories due to early-onset Alzheimer’s.

The episode confirms this: the threat has shifted from random violence to a targeted personal attack tied to Angelo’s past hits.

The season’s structural logic points toward several potential identity reveals. Dutch , the friend and handler whose trust issues with Angelo run deep, who may have a brother’s grievance buried in their shared history remains the most dramatically satisfying candidate. The showrunner’s careful non-denial when asked directly if we’ve already seen the Ferryman on screen is the season’s most telling editorial choice.

As showrunner Zelman told TV Insider: “The question of who the Ferryman is and what they want , it’s going to be surprising, and it’s going to be a fun guessing game as we go through the season. I think that it’s a spoiler I won’t reveal. I won’t say one way or another.”

What a Killer Fears More Than Death

Memory of a Killer is, beneath its crime thriller architecture, a meditation on what it means to be held accountable when your own mind cannot maintain the evidence of your crimes. Angelo has spent decades compartmentalising building internal walls as impenetrable as the external ones that separate his identities. Alzheimer’s doesn’t respect walls. It dissolves them at the molecular level.

The series has always been about compartmentalisation how Angelo has kept his work as a contract killer sealed off from his identity as a father. But the season makes it painfully clear: the walls are cracking, and Alzheimer’s isn’t even the most dangerous thing coming for him.

The deepest irony the show is building toward is this: Angelo created two identities to protect one. The disease may force him to choose between them or may strip both away, leaving him neither the killer nor the father, but some reduced third thing. The series asks whether a man who cannot remember what he has done can still be held responsible for it. It has not yet answered that question. The final episodes will be its test.

The Problems the Show Cannot Solve

For all its genuine strengths, Memory of a Killer carries several structural problems that have followed it from the pilot.

There’s too little world-building, almost no setup for Angelo as a character outside of his descriptors like “assassin,” “father,” and “patient.” The show’s universe feels surprisingly contained and even slight.

The supporting cast particularly Dutch’s criminal network remains underwritten. We understand the mechanics of Angelo’s employment but not its texture. The New York underworld he operates in feels like a set rather than a world.

The Ferryman mythology, for all its symbolic resonance, creates a plotting problem: an adversary defined by omniscience and mythology is functionally impossible to defeat through the kinds of investigative detective work the show keeps staging. Angelo cannot outmanoeuvre someone who is already, structurally, ahead of every move.

And the show’s most fundamental tension between prestige drama and broadcast procedural remains unresolved. With so much competition out there, it feels increasingly difficult to preach patience with a show that has so little personality. After all, first impressions are often all that we remember.

That last line lands with unintentional resonance against the show’s own premise.

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There is no shortage of films prepared to warn us about artificial intelligence. Since the moment HAL 9000 refused to open the pod bay doors, cinema has been running the same cautionary simulation on a loop, iterating on the theme with varying degrees of elegance. Minority Report made it poetry. RoboCop made it satire. Mercy makes it a headache and yet, against genuinely considerable odds, it also makes it intermittently thrilling.

Mercy is a 2026 American science fiction thriller film directed by Timur Bekmambetov, starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson.

The plot involves a detective (Pratt) who is accused of murdering his wife and must prove his innocence to an artificial intelligence judge (Ferguson). The film was released in the United States by Amazon MGM Studios on January 23, 2026.

The film grossed $54.3 million worldwide against a $60 million budget and received negative reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, 25% of 173 critics’ reviews are positive.

That 25% is earned. It just shouldn’t be the ceiling. Mercy arrives loaded with one of the most genuinely timely premises in recent Hollywood memory , AI as judge, jury, and executioner, in a surveillance state where every camera in the city is a potential witness and then proceeds to squander most of it in favour of countdown-clock mechanics and plot twists that announce themselves three scenes in advance.

It is a film that had the ingredients to matter, and chose instead to be a popcorn thriller. The tragedy is not that it failed. It’s that it knew exactly what it was reaching for and pulled its hand back at the last moment.

Los Angeles, 2029

In a futuristic Los Angeles with crime on the rise, the Mercy Capital Court uses artificial intelligence judges to put defendants on trial for violent crimes. The AI judges give the defendants all available resources to find and provide all the evidence needed, and are given 90 minutes to prove their innocence, or be executed via a sonic blast.

This is the world Bekmambetov constructs, and for the first ten minutes of Mercy, it is genuinely unnerving.

The surveillance architecture is not science fiction , it is tomorrow’s infrastructure described in yesterday’s breathless marketing language. The screenplay by Marco van Belle raises legitimately disturbing questions about our utter lack of privacy in today’s world of social media profile sharing, surveillance cameras, “citizen journalists” wielding smartphones, Gemini, ChatGPT, body cams, and so on.

Every doorbell, every drone, every Ring camera feeds into a unified municipal cloud. The Mercy Court acts as judge, jury, and executioner.

Chris will have the city’s “Municipal Cloud” at his disposal, giving him access to every camera, cell phone, and database.

There’s a handy onscreen Guilty Meter that displays the probability that Chris committed the crime and right now it’s in the high 90s. He has 90 minutes to get that number below 92%, or he will be executed on the spot.

The premise is kinetic and democratic in a perverse way: you are not simply arraigned before justice, you are handed the tools of your own salvation. The system’s cruelty is not malice , it is confidence. It has already decided.

Strapped to the Chair

Detective Christopher “Chris” Raven (Chris Pratt) wakes up in the Mercy Court interrogation seat knowing almost nothing. He was drunk the night before.

He got into a fight at a bar. He blacked out. And now an artificial intelligence tells him that his wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis) has been murdered, that the digital evidence points overwhelmingly to him as her killer, and that he has ninety minutes to shift that probability or die.

Maddox contends that there’s a 97.5% chance that Chris offed his spouse, and she grants him an hour-and-a-half to lower that percentage below the 92% guilty threshold. What this means in practice is that Chris frantically questions his buddies and scrutinises on-screen material in the hope of spying something out of place.

Chris’s investigation is hampered because he was wasted at a local tavern in the hours just after the crime was committed, got into a nasty barroom brawl, and then blacked out, only to regain consciousness after he was arrested and strapped into that chair.

He doesn’t have a lawyer. He has his wits, his detective’s training, a hangover, and the entire surveillance infrastructure of Los Angeles piped directly to a screen in front of him. It is an unusually democratic version of hell.

The evidence against Raven looks damning. He has a drinking problem. He has a documented temper. Earlier that night, he violently resisted arrest at a bar. A home security camera captures him entering the house minutes before Nicole is stabbed. From a probability standpoint, Mercy’s case seems airtight. But from a justice standpoint, it feels reckless. Raven does not have a lawyer.

He is severely hungover. His only advantage is that he is a police officer with friends who can help from the outside.

Those friends form the film’s outside-the-chair cast: his partner Jaq Diallo (Kali Reis), colleague Holt, and others working from the outside to feed him the evidence he needs.

The investigation spills from the courtroom into the streets of Los Angeles in a way that keeps the film’s visual language from entirely collapsing under the weight of its central gimmick , one man, one chair, one screen.

The Film’s Most Interesting Character

Rebecca Ferguson plays Judge Maddox, an AI who is part of the Mercy program.

She is the film’s most compelling presence, which is both a compliment to Ferguson and a structural problem for a movie nominally built around Chris Pratt.

Ferguson is one of the best actors around, who is reduced here to playing what is essentially a talking head — an emotionless program speaking in a robotic voice.

They’re never in the same room together, because Judge Maddox isn’t actually in any room. That static dynamic between Chris and Judge Maddox is countermanded with an endless barrage of images shot in varying styles: private cell phone clips, police drone footage, visuals captured by restaurants, street corner cameras, a neighbor’s “bird cam.”

And yet within those constraints, Ferguson builds something genuinely unsettling: a consciousness that is utterly certain of its own neutrality, impeccably courteous, and completely blind to the implications of that certainty.

Ferguson carries herself with the calm, composed arrogance of a program that’s convinced it’s irreproachable and will locate the truth by processing information rather than understanding it.

The film’s most philosophically interesting moment is a brief scene in which Maddox visibly malfunctions upon hearing Chris reference his “gut instincts.” The film foreshadows its finale with a scene in which Maddox goes on the fritz after hearing about Chris’s “gut instincts,” which don’t compute in her ultra-rational mind.

It is the best thing Mercy does , a flash of genuine inquiry into whether justice is a function of data or a function of something that data cannot measure. The film doesn’t explore it. It moves on. But for a moment, it looked like a better version of itself.

Red Herrings and Real Suspects

As the clock ticks, Chris begins systematically dismantling the evidence against him and reassembling it around other figures. Early suspicion falls on Holt , a colleague with murky connections to Nicole before the investigation pivots dramatically when a name surfaces from the case files: Rob Nelson.

Suspecting Holt may have killed Nicole, Chris tries to contact Rob. Holt instead answers the phone, and he explains that Rob is responsible for the missing chemicals.

Chris reviews his daughter Britt’s social media posts, which reveal that a stranger had been hiding in their basement since the barbecue. His neighbor’s security cameras display a rustling in the bushes, and Rob is seen exiting the neighbor’s trunk in parking lot surveillance footage.

Rob is not merely a suspect. He is a man with a specific and devastating grievance. The SWAT team arrives at Rob’s house, finding it empty, but they uncover stolen chemicals and detailed plans to craft a bomb. Maddox discovers that Rob’s brother, David Webb, was the first person Mercy Court executed, and Chris realises that Rob is orchestrating revenge against him and the court.

This is where the film’s architecture sharpens. Rob is not a simple villain. Rob murdered Nicole, but his motivation is not cruelty , it is strategy. He knows police will shoot him before he reaches the Department of Justice building.

The explosives in the Viking truck are meant to destroy the Mercy data centre. Britt is leverage , she prevents intervention. Rob does not intend to escape. He intends to permanently end the system. From his perspective, this is not terrorism. It is correct. If Mercy Court exists, more innocent people will die. Destroying it becomes, in his mind, a moral act.

The film draws a disturbing parallel: Chris created Mercy to stop criminals. Rob commits a crime to stop Mercy. Both believe they are protecting future victims. Both justify harm using justice.

The Ending Explained: The Machine Is Innocent. The Humans Are Not.

The climax arrives at speed. Chris confronts Rob, and they fight until Chris is able to disarm Rob. Chris prepares to kill Rob, but Britt and Maddox talk him down. Jaq shoots Rob, who proclaims that David was innocent of the murder he was executed for, as Rob was on the phone with David at the time of the victim’s death. Maddox retrieves footage that confirms this.

And then the film delivers its real revelation. It is revealed that Jaq dumped David’s phone, which would have been enough evidence to exonerate David, in an effort to prove Mercy’s efficacy. Jaq and Rob are both taken into custody. As Britt reconciles with Chris, Maddox shuts off and Chris’s case is dismissed.

To understand why this matters, we need to understand what Jaq’s action actually means. The investigation reveals that Jaq destroyed David Webb’s phone to guarantee a conviction. Her motivation mirrors Chris’s earlier mindset. She believed Mercy Court worked and removed doubt, thereby protecting society. She did not intend to kill an innocent man. She intended to help justice.

This is the film’s most genuinely disturbing idea, buried in its final act: the wrongful execution of David Webb was not the result of a malfunctioning AI. It was the result of a human being , a true believer deciding that the system needed to succeed badly enough to justify corrupting it.

The film complicates blame. Rob murdered Nicole. Jaq caused David’s execution. Chris created the system. Maddox carried out the sentence. Responsibility spreads across human decision-making.

This leads to the film’s final philosophical question: if a machine executes an innocent person, who committed the murder? The programmer? The officer? The data provider? Or the society that demanded certainty?

The film’s answer or rather its refusal to give a clean one is its most honest moment. Mercy refuses a simple answer. Maddox made the judgment, but every human around it shaped the information.

As for the system itself: Bill Peterson’s neighbor’s backyard motion camera captured Rob leaving the house. But a network outage prevented the AI from retrieving it before the trial. Mercy Court’s flaw becomes clear: it does not fail because it is malicious. It fails because it is incomplete. And an incomplete system with irreversible punishment is indistinguishable from injustice.

The machine shuts down. The system is discredited. Chris solves the mystery and proves his innocence, but the victory feels hollow. The real trial was not about Nicole’s murder. It was about Chris confronting the consequences of his belief that justice must always be immediate.

The film’s final idea is uncomfortable: justice is not designed to eliminate mistakes. It is designed to slow them down. Mercy Court promised perfect decisions. The legal system promises careful ones. Chris once saw caution as weakness. Now he recognises it as protection.

The Performances

Chris Pratt as Chris Raven : Pratt can be a forceful and convincing actor with the right material, most notably the Guardians of the Galaxy series, but his physicality is a key component of his best performances. For the great majority of time here, Pratt is immobilised, and his emoting isn’t always entirely convincing. You can see him…trying. It is genuinely the fairest assessment. Pratt is committed.

The material contains him. A different kind of actor , one whose primary instrument is interiority rather than movement might have found more inside this concept. Pratt finds what he can, and in the film’s most human moments (his terror at his daughter’s kidnapping, his final decision not to kill Rob), he finds enough.

Rebecca Ferguson as Judge Maddox : The film’s most interesting performance is its most constrained. Rebecca Ferguson’s non-Dredd-ful judge is the only good reason to watch it, as one critic drily noted.

Appearing exclusively from the neck up, speaking in a register calibrated to be simultaneously reassuring and inhuman, Ferguson builds a character who is genuinely novel not the HAL 9000 of menacing silence, not the warm AI companion of science fiction comfort food, but something colder and stranger: a consciousness that believes it is serving justice while being utterly indifferent to the human cost of error.

The Screenlife Format: Gimmick or Grammar?

Bekmambetov is the godfather of the “screenlife” genre , the approach of telling stories entirely through screens, cameras, and digital interfaces. He produced Unfriended, Searching, and Missing, and as a director he has taken some admirable gunslinger swings with the likes of Night Watch and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

With Mercy, he brings the format to IMAX , the largest possible canvas for the most claustrophobic possible concept.

A can’t-miss event for the subset of viewers fascinated by the screenlife format. For those who aren’t part of that group, Mercy will either be a solid, by-the-numbers program with enough formal panache to keep things interesting, or a migraine-provoking nightmare.

The format is most effective when the film leans into its own absurdism , the guilty meter ticking down, the cascade of conflicting footage, the sense of a city being forensically autopsied in real time.

It’s least effective when it asks us to sit with Chris while he watches a screen while we watch a screen showing a screen showing Chris watching a screen. There is a point at which formal experimentation becomes a mise en abyme of diminishing returns.

What the Film Gets Right, and What It Gets Wrong

Mercy succeeds as a delivery mechanism for tension. The story unfolds in real time, with the clock ticking down from 90 minutes, and that makes for some admittedly effective dramatic tension.

The countdown structure is borrowed from every ticking-clock thriller in history, but it works. The 90-minute trial maps onto the film’s runtime in a way that gives the whole enterprise an unusual urgency , we feel the clock not as a narrative device but as a physical pressure.

It succeeds as a showcase for one specific, underwritten idea: that automated justice corrupts not through malfunction but through the humans who certify its outputs. The ending of Mercy attributes the system’s failure to human manipulation rather than a malfunction of AI.

The film frames the story as a cautionary example of how human decisions can influence automated systems.

Where it fails and it fails consistently and frustratingly is in its refusal to seriously engage with the implications of its own premise. Despite existing on, and being about, screens, the film has nothing to say about this dynamic.

Its sole concern is the reliability (or lack thereof) of machines, especially when it comes to matters of life and death. This is a debate that can only go one way, and Mercy doesn’t pretend otherwise.

The real question Mercy should be asking is not whether AI can make mistakes in a courtroom. Of course it can. The real question is why we built it anyway , what vacuum of trust in human institutions drove an entire society to outsource death sentences to a probability engine. That question is gestured toward and never answered. It is the film’s deepest wound.

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