A road movie about the death sentence with a sweet but convoluted sapphic romance at its centre. My Days of Mercy shows two women on different sides of a political split and questions what mercy looks like in courtrooms, families, and love.
Lucy (Elliot Page) and her sister Martha (Amy Seimetz) have spent eight years protesting executions while fighting to overturn their father’s conviction for murdering their mother. At a vigil, Lucy meets Mercy (Kate Mara), a young attorney whose family staunchly supports capital punishment. Sparks fly anyway. Between rallies, long drives, and late-night calls, attraction deepens into an affair that keeps colliding with secrets, distance, and the case that defines Lucy’s life.
The younger daughter of a man on death row, Lucy is sensitive, principled, and still searching for her own place in the world. Her protests and budding romance with Mercy become her way of negotiating love, loyalty, and justice.
Elliot Page
Elliot Page is a Canadian actor acclaimed for Juno, Inception, and The Umbrella Academy. Here, Page strips back glamour for a raw, intimate performance that captures both vulnerability and resilience.
A young attorney whose family supports the death penalty, Mercy enters Lucy’s life as both an opponent and a lover. She’s confident, flirtatious, but also trapped between her family’s expectations and her own desires.
Kate Mara
Kate Mara is an American actress known for House of Cards and Fantastic Four. In My Days of Mercy, she balances charm and hesitation, creating a layered character whose allure hides emotional conflict.
Director
Tali Shalom-Ezer
An Israeli filmmaker drawn to thorny relationships and moral gray zones. Her earlier work (Princess) also navigates bodies, boundaries, and power; here she stages a romance where intimacy keeps colliding with ideology, letting character beats—not speeches—carry the politics.
BEST SCENES
📍 “Drunk” deflection after the first kiss — a perfect, painful dodge that sets their push-pull dynamic.
📍 The hair-tie — Mercy draws a boundary… then breaks it, flirting while pulling Lucy closer.
📍 Highway sing-along → motel heat — joy spills into desire; the film’s sunniest spiral into sex.
📍 House-door reveal — Lucy finds Mercy’s boyfriend; the warmth drains in one shot.
📍 Prison corridor — execution day, silent devastation; Mercy present but powerless.
📍 Final meet-up — no grand speech, just a cautious “Where do you want to go?” / “Everywhere, I guess.”
My Days of Mercy Review
Review
This is a romance built from arguments, car rides, and stolen weekends. Page plays Lucy with raw, unvarnished honesty—often bare-faced, always present—while Mara’s Mercy is disarmingly confident, flirtatious, and guarded. Their chemistry sells both the swoon and the ache: the teasing (“drunk kiss” denial), the hair-tie moment that’s half boundary and half provocation, the window-down sing-along that tumbles into sex, and the brutal reveal at Mercy’s home that turns Lucy’s crush into heartbreak.
The film isn’t a message movie wearing a love story; it’s a love story that refuses to flatten politics. Families, class, religion, and the carceral state press in on every scene. Lucy’s house is held together by protest schedules and overdue bills; Mercy’s world tilts toward professional ambition and filial duty. One woman wants absolution; the other wants certainty. When the case twists toward an answer, the gulf between them is suddenly measurable—and merciless.
What I appreciate most is the film’s everyday texture: cooking for a crowd, cleaning up alone, driving all night to meet in the next state, pretending your heart is fine at a vigil. The sex scenes are hot but humane, never there to “prove” queerness, more to chart power shifting between two people who want different things. The ending reads as cautiously hopeful, but the film never lies about the work it would take.