The trailer for Amazon MGM Studios' "Mercy" starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov.

If you're like me, you watch movies as an escape. Whether it's at the theater or at home, it's a chance to put your phone down and go somewhere else for two hours. But in the digital age, there's a growing subgenre of films where the so-called "escape" is on phone and computer screens. There's apparently a name for this, which I was completely unaware of (thanks ChatGPT!); it's called screenlife.

Examples include horror flicks like 2014's "Unfriended," thrillers like 2018's "Searching" and 2022's "Missing" as well as last year's widely-panned "War of the Worlds" remake. If you missed those, there's an episode of "Modern Family" that takes a page from the screenlife playbook.

Notably, all those screenlife movies I cited were produced by Kazakh-Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, a pioneer in the subgenre who is now out with his new screenlife-adjacent film, "Mercy."

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Chris Pratt stars as Chris Raven in "Mercy," from Amazon MGM Studios.  (Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios)

"Mercy" follows Detective Chris Raven (Chris........

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