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.