Acused by the cloud

About the film Mercy by Timur Bekmambetov, USA, 2026

by: Nicolás Quintero

Human beings have always sought the creation of flawless systems that allow them to use mathematics to bring order to chaos. In a dystopian atmosphere where the use of artificial intelligence is commonplace and socio-political conflict reigns, science fiction ideas emerge that imagine figures capable of being judge, jury and executioner and firmly extolling the ‘I am the law’ mantra, such as Judge Dredd (1995) played by Sylvester Stallone or the recent Judge Maddox in Mercy (2026), which proposes the existence of an AI with access to the cloud capable of performing such tasks.

The film imagines a future in the style of Philip K. Dick where a police officer mired in trouble, played with powerful expressivity by Chris Pratt, is accused of a crime and has 90 minutes to prove his innocence. The claustrophobic atmosphere stems from the idea of having the protagonist imprisoned for almost the entire film and serves to establish a setting that emphasises how technological development has only served to isolate human beings. Further proof that the final image of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) spoke of how future innovation would lead to the encapsulation of humankind.

Perhaps the executive vision of Charles Roven, producer of The Dark Knight (2008), which discussed post-truth and mass surveillance, and Oppenheimer (2023), which returned to the past to talk about the risks of unregulated advances, emphasises the idea that technology may ultimately become a weapon designed to eliminate human privacy.

If in Minority Report (2002) the main character manipulates images like a film editor, here he manages requests before an artificial judge who accesses video recordings and social media with astonishing ease, reminiscent of the Orwellian myth of 1984. An algorithmic hologram created with the coldness Rebecca Ferguson adds as if she were a female version of HAL 9000: the robot that inspired Anthony Hopkins’ character Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Essentially, this could be Hitchcock’s version of Spellbound (1945) filtered through the cyber lens of the director who best understands the visual dynamics of immediacy that govern the present: Michael Bay.

One of Bay’s contemporaries, Timur Bekmambetov was responsible for one of the greatest Russian blockbusters, Night Watch (2006), where he applied special effects similar to those in Matrix (1999) to the horror genre for what we could call the Russian answer to Underworld (2003). Long after building a career in Hollywood, he models his most mature film with a vibrant montage conveyed through very short shots and fast-paced chases with alternating timings, which he uses to great narrative effect.

Mercy is, above all, a reflection on the risks involved in creating Bayesian models whose a priori distribution is based on guilt. It is a highly advanced piece of software that generates predictions, creates confidence thresholds and represses human beings who end up outside the main diagonal of a confusion matrix in an environment where a mistake comes at the cost of a life.

Hence, the moral of this technothriller is that perfection lies not in objectively sticking to facts only but in redemption and the understanding that mistakes are an essential part of human behaviour.