What if ChatGPT had the power to kill people? Mercy conjures up this horrifying scenario, then ponders whether it’d really be all that bad. What if your AI judge, jury, and executioner looked and talked like the sublimely charming Rebecca Ferguson, say? Wouldn’t that be a calming sight while your last breath departed your body? And all because an algorithm that scrapes information from the digital world decided you were guilty and no longer worthy of life?
Director Timur Bekmambetov’s latest is a baffling piece of work that happily swipes the mood and aesthetics of Hollywood’s police state dystopias (Minority Report, RoboCop, Blade Runner etc), while presenting such horrors as an agreeable norm. It opens with a voiceover so menacingly chipper you’d naturally assume it to be satirical (it’s not): there’s a crime epidemic in Los Angeles being squarely blamed on civil unrest and homelessness, leading to the creation of the Mercy court.
