Humans are like spiders weaving industrious webs. Starting from a web’s center and moving outward, a centrifugal effort, are vulnerable silk threads called life’s difficulty. The further a life is spun, the further weaving in calamity.

In the recent movie Mercy, a Los Angeles police detective dryly reminds his Artificial Intelligence Judge (Rebecca Ferguson), a human interface called Maddox who claims to be only computer programming and not able to emote, hence her statement, “I am only here for the facts,” that these are only a bare start. Quickly Judge Maddox intuits what “thinking aloud” means, how a joke works, and trusting your gut. Subtle life dynamics are not initially taught at AI Judge school. But Maddox learns empathy on the fly, like we humans can. Goes noticed that spiders catch flies and so painful story webs are what trap these characters.

Judge Maddox has one hour and a half—90 eternal minutes—to sentence Detective Raven (Chris Pratt) to his death. Beyond her basic digital coding she learns what he means that original facts are a starting place, but the real sleuthing kicks in on intuition, mystery, and God’s dice rolling called lucky chance—these solve the case once detectives secure the “facts.”

Raven’s wife Nicole (Annabelle Wallis) has been brutally stabbed at home and he is the prime suspect. The Los Angeles AI Mercy Justice System gives suspects these brief 90 minutes to establish innocence otherwise fatal sonic blast is the jolt. Which is an instantaneous “justice” method or a desperate solution because Los Angeles has rampant unemployment that leads to social chaos; wide sections of the city are overrun with people closing neighborhoods as they occupy tent camps in the middle of the streets called Red Zones. These folks need swift Judge Maddox sentencing.

Raven awakens in the modern court system while returning to consciousness from an alcoholic stupor. He reeks of distress. Where am I? What is going on? How does a justice system meant for others apply to a Los Angeles police detective’s life? All the existential questions routinely being asked of ourselves—albeit sitting soberly in our movie theater seats—in these futuristic times. The movie’s time period is 2029 so we only have a few years left.

Still, the movie powerfully intrigues on reverberative justice, the ordinary kind where trusting people love each other just enough to move beyond distrust, a vulnerable admission Raven makes when he sees on the screens all around him how he has, after one year of sobriety and one year returned to drinking heavily, abandoned his closest: “we fail people,” he admits quietly.

The movie doesn’t fail though. Director Timur Bekmambetov creates very clever cinematic ways to show how digital our lives are and these give a sense of eerily looking collaboratively into a fortune teller’s crystal glass ball. We don’t trust our wacky gypsy with a witch’s red bandana tied around her silvery black curls. We write off AI Judge Maddox as an image on a computer screen and no more. Yet watching this movie resonates truthfully during every futuristic minute that feels contemporary: children lost in the foster care system; children lost in homes where parents aren’t paying attention; police professionals gone rogue despairing a broken world; utopia belief that more digital will save us; and addictions false panacea to long term grieving. White men throwing alcohol and mayhem at unresolved grief is a central web spun throughout. Even so, can be inspiring when characters spider-crawl a way back to life despite broken webs.

Announcing what is lamely stereotyping does not detract from a movie to watch. Why the one woman of color and woman of complexity, Jacqueline Diallo (Kali Reis), has to be storied as villainous is cinema’s familiar trope and unnecessary. At the screenwriting level we could have gone any multifaceted direction with her character. What I don’t want is for any youth of color, especially female, to internalize any nonsense that Hollywood stereotypes are message true.

One social fabric tear in the web doesn’t ruin the entire work. Mercy shows us honestly how we look in the crystal glass ball called artificial intelligences and human lives interacting. “We make mistakes. We learn. Humans and AI,” Raven admits through a trembly voice in a denouement scene. Learning from futuristic Los Angeles that Mercy portrays is parallel to learning from ancients, meaning how Native Peoples revered Spider Woman, a cosmology goddess who taught humans co-creation with nature’s wisdom, this balance and harmony in life and to focus on one art especially—weaving. Early morning light dancing on a spider’s web is lightness for artistic detail to weave an artistic Navajo (Dene) rug, or, in the movie Mercy’s case, evolving into an intricate story. Weaving takes time and patience for complexity in theme and story and delivery. And Mercy delivers a tale threading subtle story designs of frailty and hope.