Netflix movie review Mercy Black: What did I just watch?

The latest thriller from Netflix and Blumhouse, Mercy Black, will leave you scratching your head trying to figure out what you just watched. Spoilers ahead!

The Blumhouse production, Mercy Black has a great setup. One that is ripped straight from the headlines actually. A girl who was part of a heinous attack on one of her friends when she was younger is being let out of a mental hospital.

The attack was perpetrated by two girls that wanted to sacrifice their friend for “Mercy Black.” A mythological being who is supposed to take away your suffering if you give her your pain or something like that. The girl, Marina Hess (Daniella Pineda), had a sick mother and was supposedly doing the sacrifice so her mother would be healthy again.

Fast-forward 15 years and Marina is being let out to begin her new life. She is nervous about it at first and seems to not recall exactly what happened that fateful day. She feels like she wasn’t herself when it happened. Regardless, her sister Alice (Elle LaMont) picks her up and takes her to stay with her and her son.

Marina meets her sister’s boyfriend (Austin Amelio, The Walking Dead) who apparently is obsessed with the attack and tells Marina that Mercy Black went viral. Her nephew eventually figures out that his aunt wasn’t away at art school and starts looking up info on Mercy Black. At one point early on the house is attacked by people who think she’s crazy. Sounds interesting, right?

That’s when it starts to get crazy.

The triple twist

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As the movie goes on we are trying to decide if Mercy Black is real. Before she was released from the facility, Marina gives her diagnosis back to the psychiatrist and among her diagnoses is “a tendency toward hallucinations.” The mention of this feels like it will be important at some point. When she starts to see things we still have to decide if it’s real or if it’s just in her head so this is a fun element to be added to the story.

Then the kid starts seeing things and now you have to ask if he’s also having hallucinations or is Mercy Black after him. Eventually, you are given one answer in a twist that made sense based on everything you’ve seen in the movie up to that point. We were in a good place. Then just minutes later something strange happens and we have to wonder if Marina is hallucinating again. Just as we think we’ve closed one door, another opens, then a third one opens to close out the movie.

By the end, I was completely overwhelmed by the confusion caused throughout the movie. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Overall

If nothing else, Mercy Black is entertaining. It had my attention throughout and didn’t lose me completely until the very end. I had to check twitter to see what people were saying about the film and some seem to like the chaos so I won’t say it’s not worth a watch. I will nitpick one thing because I am a stickler for details.

When Marina gets out of the psych ward she is confused by the idea of being able to search something on a computer. I may be dating myself but the last time I checked Ask Jeeves was around back in the late 1990’s so she should have known how to use a search engine even if she hadn’t been on a computer for the past 15 years.

Anyway, there are also quite a few jump-scare moments as well which I know many aren’t a fan of. This is the type of movie that would be ideal for a movie night with a few people so you can laugh about it or debate what really happened at the ending together.