by Hudson Moura
This week’s two new releases, Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy and Sam Raimi’s Send Help, approach contemporary genre cinema through two familiar infrastructures of suspense: the tribunal and the survival scenario. Let me be clear, I am a huge fan of both directors! However, both films announce high-concept premises—one grounded in algorithmic justice, the other in workplace humiliation transposed into a desert-tropical-island revenge fantasy—yet each also reveals how quickly an appealing hook can be constrained by formula. What emerges is a revealing contrast between a thriller that gestures toward urgent questions about evidentiary regimes and digital life, and a horror-comedy that leans so heavily on sitcom-like retaliation that its horror DNA becomes almost incidental. Send Help’s audience wasn’t merely laughing—they were laughing out loud.
Mercy (Timur Bekmambetov): Algorithmic Judgment and the Screen-as-World
Set in the near future, Mercy stages its central conflict as a race against time: a detective (Chris Pratt) is accused of murdering his wife and is placed on trial before an advanced A.I. judge—an apparatus he once publicly endorsed. He has ninety minutes to prove his innocence before the system delivers its verdict. The conceit is tightly engineered for contemporary anxieties: the transformation of legal judgment into computation, the substitution of deliberation with “accuracy,” and the seductive promise that data can settle moral and political uncertainty.
Bekmambetov’s most distinctive choice is formal. Much of the narrative is mediated through a monitor perspective, and the protagonist is physically immobilized, attached to a chair in the A.I. tribunal. His agency is therefore displaced onto networks: he communicates with friends and family, urging them to investigate and to retrieve fragments that might exonerate him. This screen-based dispositif is not merely stylistic; it allegorizes the film’s core premise. The protagonist’s life—and, crucially, his defense—exists as a dossier of images, messages, calls, and recordings: a digital footprint that can be replayed, re-ordered, scrutinized, and weaponized.
At its best, Mercy prompts questions that are genuinely worth holding onto after the credits. If an A.I. judge prides itself on factual precision, what counts as a “fact” in a world where images and audio are treated as privileged evidence? What kind of truth is produced when the archive of everyday life becomes retroactively searchable and legally actionable? The film’s strongest insight is that the past is no longer simply remembered; it is re-accessed—re-lived through recordings, reframed through metadata, and interpreted by systems that claim neutrality while encoding assumptions about credibility and causality.
Yet the film’s conceptual promise is undercut by its reliance on familiar thriller mechanics. The plot leans heavily on basic clichés, and the identity of the culprit becomes legible far too early, flattening suspense into mere procedural inevitability. That predictability is compounded by the film’s aesthetic constraint: staying within a monitor-driven perspective may initially feel thematically apt, but over time it risks monotony. What begins as a compelling formal analogy—screen life as lived reality—can become visually repetitive, even inert, especially when the narrative itself offers few surprises. The result is a film that remains entertaining in the moment, but ultimately feels like a draft of a sharper work: a thriller with timely questions that never fully escape the gravity of formula.
Rating: 3/5
Send Help (Sam Raimi, prod.): Revenge on an Island, Horror in Retreat
If Mercy is a thriller about the coercive clarity of data, Send Help is a genre hybrid whose conflict is driven less by technology than by social power. The premise is built on an instantly recognizable archetype: a woman (Rachel McAdams) is demeaned and humiliated at work; after an accident, she becomes stranded on a desert tropical island with her boss (Dylan O’Brien). The isolation turns into opportunity: she can finally enact the revenge and reversal of hierarchy that her workplace prevented.
Sam Raimi’s association with the production carries expectations. Raimi’s cinema has often made humor inseparable from horror, with mockery and irony functioning as a self-aware commentary on genre conventions. In Send Help, however, the tonal balance tips decisively toward comedy. The film seems to discover more pleasure in situational payback—small humiliations, petty reversals, and comedic power plays—than in sustained dread. The result is a work that retains the outline of a horror setup (two characters stranded, vulnerability, exposure, potential violence) but rarely commits to horror as a sensory or affective experience.
This is where the film’s limitation becomes clearest. The narrative is populated by clichés that are not merely recognizable but structurally dominant: the abusive employer caricature, the cathartic revenge beats, the predictable shifts in dominance. The fantasy of revenge is not in itself uninteresting—indeed, it can be politically legible as a response to workplace coercion and gendered humiliation—but here it is treated in such conventional terms that it risks feeling pre-scripted. One can sense the film’s potential for darker ambiguity: on an island, survival can deform ethics; power can be reproduced in new forms; revenge can reveal its own violence. Yet the film largely avoids that terrain, choosing instead to play the premise as a string of comic satisfactions.
For viewers seeking Raimi’s signature blend—where humor sharpens horror rather than replacing it—Send Help may feel like an opportunity partially missed. The comedic angle is often enjoyable, but the film seems to forget the very engine that could have made it distinctive: a horror sensibility that intensifies, rather than softens, the cruelty and absurdity of its social setup.
Rating: 3/5
Two Genre Experiments, Two Kinds of Disappointment
Seen together, Mercy and Send Help illustrate a recurring tension in contemporary mainstream genre production: the friction between concept and execution. Mercy has the more provocative thematic architecture—algorithmic justice, the evidentiary authority of images and sounds, the legal afterlife of digital traces—but undermines it through predictability and visual monotony. Send Help has the more immediately accessible pleasure—comic reversal and interpersonal sparring—yet dilutes its promise by leaning on clichés and allowing horror to recede into the background.
Neither film is without entertainment value. But both suggest that the most compelling versions of their premises remain just out of reach: Mercy as a genuinely unsettling meditation on machine judgment and mediated truth; Send Help as a sharper horror-comedy where laughter and fear would be mutually reinforcing rather than competing impulses.