AI is not programmed – it’s grown. Available models are still in their nascent stages. They’re children, in that sense.
For Timur Bekmambetov, the director of Mercy, that places a responsibility on those raising them.
“We should be like parents,” Bekmambetov tells The National. “The kind that try not to scream at each other – not to lie in front of the kids, not to show them our bad behaviour.”
As things stand, he does not believe humans are doing a particularly good job of that. “We can’t change ourselves so quickly,” he says. “We’re not angels.”
That view shapes Mercy, a big-budget screenlife thriller that stars Chris Pratt as a detective in a near future where the world’s worst criminals are placed before an AI judge and given 90 minutes to argue for their innocence before being executed.
The catch is that the system was never designed for anyone to survive. Pratt’s character realises that quickly when he wakes in the chair himself, accused of murdering his wife and facing a process engineered to end only one way.
Mercy begins in a world Bekmambetov sees as cruel and unjust. As the film unfolds, however, the machine at its centre begins to change – observing the detective’s actions, reassessing its assumptions and, eventually, learning to act differently.
“I think right now it’s very important to create content that begins a dialogue between us and the machines,” Bekmambetov says. “To negotiate, communicate and convince each other.”
He sees Mercy as an early step in that process. “I believe that in the future, AI will control the world,” he adds. “And maybe I’ll get a message saying, ‘Remember, he was on our side'. And they'll give me a few more tokens to lead."
The joke lands lightly, but the anxiety behind it does not. Bekmambetov admits he has never found it harder to imagine what lies ahead.
“It’s a darkness,” he says. “We know nothing about the world in which we will co-exist with that digital species. I have a three-year-old son, and I try to imagine what his life will be like in 10 years. I feel like we’ve never known less.”
For Bekmambetov, that uncertainty is why art still matters. Humans have spent centuries fighting one another, he says, but literature, cinema and culture have also shown successive generations that something better is possible.
“AI can’t tell the difference between what’s reality and what’s content,” he says. “So we need to feed it content that shows our best selves.”
That thinking also shaped how the film’s artificial intelligence is portrayed on screen. Rather than cast an AI actor to play the AI system (a technology that Bekmambetov plans to use in the future), he cast Rebecca Ferguson to play the system at the centre of the story.
For the director, the decision reflects an interest in how a human might attempt to understand the logic of an algorithm. The performance is built around how the system processes information, learns from behaviour and interacts with the world it observes.
“It’s a person trying to understand the psychology of an algorithm,” Bekmambetov says. “How it processes information, how it learns, how it interacts with reality.”
That approach gives the machine a presence that evolves alongside Chris Pratt’s character, observing his decisions and recalibrating its responses as the film unfolds. The intelligence at the centre of Mercy develops over time, shaped by what it sees and how it is addressed.
The same philosophy extends to the film’s screenlife form. Bekmambetov treats every image that the detective and the AI discover as ripped from reality – material that must thus feel immediate and grounded. Doorbell cameras, body cams, surveillance feeds and drones each carry their own visual language, reinforcing the sense that what appears on screen is being recorded.
That emphasis on realism also shaped the performances. Much of the film was shot in long, uninterrupted stretches, with Ferguson and Pratt working from separate sound stages, but connected live, playing extended scenes without stopping. Bekmambetov compares the process to theatre, where momentum is sustained across a scene rather than broken into fragments.
“The chemistry comes from staying inside the moment,” he says.
Mercy is larger in scale than Bekmambetov’s previous screenlife films, shot for Imax and built around substantial action sequences, yet the production was completed in six weeks. Virtual production stages allowed scenes set across Los Angeles to be filmed back-to-back, with digital environments shifting around static elements.
For Bekmambetov, the technology offered control over light and consistency, preserving the hyper-real look the format depends on and reinforcing the idea that what appears on screen should feel like documentation. And for the screenlife genre that he's spearheaded for the last decade and a half, the film is another testament to its still-unexplored possibilities.
Bekmambetov’s next projects will be based in the UAE, which hosted the second Screenlife Accelerator. The first programme took place in Liverpool, where one of its finalists, LifeHack, went on to premiere at SXSW in Austin last year.
“This time around, we selected eight projects in the first phase,” Bekmambetov says. “We’ll be announcing soon which ones are moving into production.”
Through the accelerator, he has also begun working more closely with emerging filmmakers including Gorkem Sifael and Ozgur Akyuz, relationships he describes as part of a longer-term commitment to developing new forms of screen-based storytelling in the region.
“I was honestly surprised by how talented people are here,” Bekmambetov says. “There’s ambition and there’s a feeling of renewal. It’s an ancient civilisation, but it feels like a reset.”
Building on that work, Bekmambetov is launching a new company in the UAE, Narrativity, which will serve as a hub for his innovation-driven projects across screenlife, artificial intelligence and emerging storytelling formats.
“The idea is for it to become a base,” he says, “a place where we can scale these formats internationally.”
For Bekmambetov, the Emirates represents a natural home for that ambition – a region investing heavily in creative infrastructure, while remaining open to experimentation in how stories are told, produced and distributed. As with Mercy, the focus is less on predicting the future than on shaping it, one project at a time.
Mercy is in cinemas now across the UAE
