In short: Mercy Black (2019)

Fifteen years ago, Marina Hess (growing up to be played by Daniella Pineda) and her friend Rebecca stabbed their other friend Lily in an attempt to invoke a being they named Mercy Black as some sort of horrible guardian angel.

Not surprisingly, Marina has spent the time since in a psychiatric institution in the – for once from a movie psychiatrist - supportive and professional care of Dr. Ward (Janeane Garofalo). Marina’s all better now, though, and so she can return to her old home to live there with her sister Alice (Elle LaMont) and Alice’s little son Bryce (Miles Emmons). As you’d expect from a horror film, Marina doesn’t seem to have gotten away from the shadow of Mercy Black very well, and curious things begin to happen, things that not only concentrate on Marina but seem to be aimed at Bryce just as much.

Owen Egerton’s Mercy Black is a rather frustrating effort, even if you can cope with the film’s deeply unpleasant decision of exploiting an actual, rather fresh murder case for cheap and shoddy thrills without showing even an ounce of the grace and depth you’d need to make this work without the people involved behind the camera coming over as complete twats.

To be fair, there are quite a few moments that demonstrate the writer/director’s ability to create effective suspense and horror sequences that don’t exclusively work via jump scares – the scene in which Bryce does attempt something very nasty with a bullying classmate is a good example – but these sequences never cohere to form an effective whole. Part of the film’s problems apart from a complete lack of ethics is that it feels unfocussed: there isn’t really anything wrong with the idea of Mercy Black threatening Marina and her nephew, but the way it plays out, it feels less than a connected double threat than two different films not quite coming together.

Another problem is the Mandatory Third Act Twist that not only makes the supernatural threat rather more quotidian (though not in a completely illogical way, at least) than I prefer but is also based on the film having kept away important information from the audience by being vague about what exactly happened in Marina’s past, supposedly letting us share the vagueness of our protagonist’s memory but in practice just making things a bit too convenient for the film. And let’s not even talk about this element of the film in relation to the victim of the actual crime this is getting its kicks off.


Thematically, there’s some nearly interesting stuff about mental illness, guilt and family in the film but like everything here, it never quite gels with anything else on screen and is too wrapped up in the film’s exploitative core. Truthfully, everything in the film that’s not making me angry, including the Mercy Black special effect in the end, seems nearly interesting but never quite realized with the thought and care it would need to at least get a decent horror flick out of the whole mess.