Mercy (2026) Review — Is the AI Courtroom Thriller Worth Watching?

What’s It About

Set in the near future, Mercy follows a detective who finds himself on the wrong side of a justice system he helped build. Accused of murdering his wife, he stands before an advanced AI judge — a piece of technology he once championed as the future of impartial law — and is given ninety minutes to prove his innocence before the system renders its verdict. That verdict, should it go against him, means execution. No appeal. No second chance. Just the cold logic of an algorithm deciding whether he lives or dies.

The film unfolds almost entirely within the courtroom — or rather, the sterile, featureless chamber where the AI judge operates — and leans hard into the ticking-clock premise. It’s a bottle drama at heart, dressed up in the sleek aesthetics of near-future tech. The detective must reconstruct the events surrounding his wife’s death in real time, presenting evidence, challenging the AI’s interpretations, and confronting uncomfortable truths about himself, his marriage, and the system he once believed in. It’s a simple premise executed with genuine tension, and that premise alone is enough to make Mercy worth your time.

The Verdict

Mercy arrives at exactly the right cultural moment. With debates about AI bias, algorithmic decision-making, and the ethics of automated systems dominating headlines — here in Australia and globally — a film about a man at the mercy of an AI judge doesn’t feel like science fiction. It feels like a thought experiment we’re already living inside. That timeliness is Mercy’s greatest asset, and the film is smart enough to know it. The script doesn’t just use AI as window dressing; it interrogates the genuine horror of a system that is, by design, incapable of doubt.

What works best here is the central tension between the detective’s emotional, messy, very human account of his marriage and the AI judge’s relentless demand for verifiable fact. There’s something deeply unsettling about watching a man try to explain grief, love, and desperation to something that processes those concepts as data points. The film gets considerable mileage out of that gap, and the lead performance — anchoring nearly every scene — earns real sympathy without letting the character off the hook entirely. He’s not straightforwardly innocent, and the film is wise enough to sit with that ambiguity rather than paper over it.

Where Mercy stumbles is in its pacing through the middle act. The ninety-minute in-film countdown is a great structural hook, but the film occasionally loses confidence in it, padding certain sequences with flashbacks that undercut the urgency rather than adding to it. There are also moments where the script reaches for a more conventional thriller playbook — last-minute revelations, a couple of beats that feel borrowed from better courtroom dramas — that slightly flatten what could have been a more singular experience. The AI judge itself, while conceptually compelling, is occasionally over-explained in ways that feel like the screenwriters didn’t fully trust the audience to keep up.

None of this is fatal. Mercy still delivers on its core promise: a tight, genuinely tense thriller with ideas worth chewing over. At 100 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the final act lands with enough weight to make the frustrations of the middle feel forgivable. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a confident one, and confidence in a high-concept premise like this goes a long way.

Who’s It For

If you’re the kind of viewer who gravitates toward films that use genre mechanics to explore bigger ideas, Mercy is squarely in your wheelhouse. Fans of Ex Machina will find a similar pleasure in watching a human systematically underestimated by a system designed to be objective, only to discover that “objective” is a far more complicated idea than it appears. There’s that same slow-burn dread, that same queasy feeling that the rules of the game were never quite what you thought they were. Mercy is less stylistically controlled than Ex Machina, but it’s working in the same intellectual territory.

It also owes an obvious debt to 12 Angry Men — the single-location setup, the methodical deconstruction of a case, the way the film becomes less about what happened and more about how we decide what happened. Australian audiences who appreciated The Platform’s use of a high-concept setting to explore systems of power and control will find similar pleasures here, though Mercy is considerably less punishing. This is a thriller that respects its audience without demanding they have a philosophy degree to follow along. It’s accessible, it’s tense, and it has something to say — which puts it comfortably ahead of most genre releases.

Where to Watch in Australia

Mercy is a new 2026 release, and as of writing, confirmed streaming availability for Australian audiences hasn’t been locked in. That’s not unusual for a film this fresh — distribution deals for the local market often take a few months to surface after a film’s initial release window closes.

Based on the type of release Mercy is — a mid-budget genre film with strong streaming appeal — it has the profile of something that tends to land on Netflix or Stan in Australia within three to six months of release. Netflix has shown consistent appetite for exactly this kind of near-future thriller, and Stan continues to pick up the sort of thoughtful genre films that fall between the cracks of major studio slates. Binge and Prime Video Australia are also worth watching, particularly if the film has any co-production ties that haven’t been widely reported. Typical streaming subscription pricing in Australia sits between $10 and $20 per month depending on the platform and tier, so there’s no need to pay premium rental prices if you’re happy to wait a few months. Keep an eye on this page — we’ll update streaming availability for Australia as soon as it’s confirmed.

Our Rating

7/10 — Mercy is a genuinely good thriller that occasionally hints at being a great one. It takes a timely concept — what happens when we hand judgment over to systems that can’t feel the weight of what they’re deciding — and builds a tense, well-performed film around it. The lead performance holds the whole thing together, the AI judge concept is more thoughtfully handled than you might expect, and the ending earns its emotional payoff without cheating to get there. The stumbles in the middle act and a few too many concessions to formula keep it from reaching the heights it’s aiming for. But I’d rather watch a film that swings for something ambitious and clips the post than one that plays it safe and lands cleanly. For Australian audiences looking for something smarter than the average action thriller, with a premise that feels genuinely relevant to conversations we’re all already having about AI and accountability, Mercy is well worth 100 minutes of your time.