Interviews
Why ‘Welcome to Mercy’ Doesn’t Focus On the Priests In Its Exorcism Tale [Exclusive]
Any exorcism film that comes out automatically has to measure up to The Exorcist. And some have even held their own like The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Last Exorcism. This week’s Welcome to Mercy has another new take on exorcism. Producer Cary Granat explained.
“What I loved about this script and this film is its uniqueness in taking you into the mind and into the world of where the person who is being possessed goes,” Granat said. “What happens when a possession occurs? Where do you go? I love the concept of when you get possessed, it’s not you anymore. Okay, well, where are you? Where are you at that moment? I think what this film does is it so uniquely questions the place that one is brought to. Is it a real place? is it a place you are just in your mind? We want the audience to answer that question but it is really cool to be taken to that place where this incredible gauntlet/series of challenges occur for you that you need to work through yourself to get out of the possession.”
In Welcome to Mercy, Madaline (Kristen Ruhlin) visits her ailing father in Latvia. After a tumultuous reunion, Madaline experiences the stigmata. This leads us to follow Madaline on her journey, rather than the priests who are normally the heroes of exorcisms.
“I think we’ve not really understood the world of possession because I think the world of possession to this point has been if a religious figure prays over you enough or a certain series of things happen external to you enough, you will come back,” Granat said. “You’ll have defeated the devil that’s inside you. This is the first film that really takes the position it’s entirely up to you. It’s entirely within your controls how you get out of the possession. There is a series of things that are happening with you that you have to accomplish so you have to overcome. I like that because ultimately, as with anything in life, any decision we make, anything we deal with is our responsibility to manage. We need to be able to overcome these things. That’s where the heart lies.”
Ruhlin wrote the screenplay intending to play the role of Madaline. Granat’s exec Joel Michaely submitted the script to him. Granat found director Tommy Bertelsen and planned to shoot the film with their Latvian partners Forma Pro, who they’d trained to make films for Russia and Latvia.
“Tommy was the first one who came in and took the mythology of Latvia and the backdrop of where we were going to shoot the film, the first one who came in and said, ‘Oh, I love these locations. I love this and this. I’d really like to own and go deeper on how do we merge so we’re not just a typical film shooting in a foreign country? We’re a film that’s going into a country and really going into that world. Let’s shoot it, let’s own the language, let’s own their customs.’ I loved that.”
Welcome to Mercy opens Friday, November 2.
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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