Mercy is like that enthusiastic science geek who tries his hand at art, has little aptitude for it, but is indulged by his elders because who’s going to criticise a kid? He’s in the wrong line, but hopefully his hobby is temporary. The movie belongs to a culturally specific subset of independent Hindi cinema: the simplistic social drama that plays mainly at South Asian diaspora international film festivals. It’s mostly the representation pick, the anyone-can-tell-a-story draft, the identity-over-merit selection. The symptoms are familiar: beginner-level craft, questionable performances, a bleeding-heart subject, actors who are also the producers (or vice versa), a semi-famous cameo, an early-2000s indipop music-video vibe, and a storyline at odds with a hummable album.
