Mercy Black movie review & film summary (2019)
For a story built on the palpability of belief—that believing in something is more powerful than fact—"Mercy Black" toes a line of practicality with its terror. What kind of monster are we dealing with here: a supernatural reckoning? Or is this flesh-and-blood slasher justice, like the hook man unleashed on those negligent ‘90s teens in “I Know What You Did Last Summer”? Egerton teases both possibilities for a long time, and it only pays off when the movie goes completely bonkers at the very end. Credit where credit's due, it’s the type of resolution that might lose some viewers’ graces, just as much as it might win a few of them over.
Egerton is very particular in how we learn about Marina's incident, flashing back to it with abrupt cuts and visual triggers. But it doesn’t feel like Marina’s memories are coming together so much as a writer/director is withholding information for the sake of creating dread, slowly bringing us to his big picture. Though these are the only moments that the film is disorienting—progressively revealing how evil these young girls were—they also make it more tedious. While treading through the mystery of its past and experiencing the supernatural shenanigans of the present, you wait for “Mercy Black” to make you afraid of its secrets. That moment never arrives.
The drama is sporadically curious, but you’ve seen the spooky stuff within "Mercy Black" more than a few times before: a creaky old home that conveniently doesn’t have a lot of lighting at night, jump scares that are telegraphed by obvious edits and music cues, a haunted-looking young boy. Even the design of Mercy herself leaves you hoping for a little more menace.
When it comes to what scares us, believing is seeing. It’s what fuels our modern viral nightmares, like in the case of the kids who don’t know better and their subsequently frightened parents (Kim Kardashian included) who gave Momo a life beyond being a cropped photo of a sculpture with a gruesome backstory attached. But that barely tapped power of “Mercy Black,” whether in scenes of trauma or terror, makes it all the more disappointing. Mercy Black is just another monster you won’t care to believe in.
