The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Nightmares have never looked so good
Netflix has given the dystopian sci-fi series ‘Black Mirror’ a big budget makeover. The results are positively filmic, says Robbie Collin
Ido love a dark movie,” says James Watkins – just in case you thought the director of The Woman in Black, the most successful British horror film of all time, might harbour a preference for puffball pink. “But there’s no question it’s getting harder for those stories to live in our current ecosystem.”
The 43-year-old filmmaker is right. With politics in turmoil and the pound on the plunge, it makes sense that 2016’s most notable cinematic success story is Bridget Jones, who in the last month has outstripped everyone but Mowgli, Dory and a handful of superheroes on the UK’s annual boxoffice chart. But, if light relief reigns supreme at the cinema, where is left for the dark relief to go? One possible answer is Netflix, which turned heads when it poached Black Mirror from Channel 4 a little over a year ago. Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed dark science-fiction anthology series had been treated by the broadcaster with the kind of tremulous, white-gloved reverence usually reserved for Ming dynasty tableware. In four years it produced just two seasons of three 45-minute episodes (an hour each with ads), plus a slightly longer Christmas special. But Netflix is giving Brooker’s series the American-style, open-her-up-and-let-herrip treatment. Since last September, a third season of six longer episodes were fast- tracked into production and were launched on the streaming service yesterday. Six more will follow at some point in 2017.
The show’s far-fetched but creepily pertinent techno-morality plays – it’s often described as a Twilight Zone for the digital age – have always been conceptually ambitious. Indeed, the most wellknown, “The National Anthem”, in which a fictional prime minister has intimate relations with a large swine, and which was praised for its oracle-like powers when a biography claimed David Cameron had achieved similar union with a pig’s head in a moment of student hedonism, is comparatively basic in its proposition.
More sophisticated was “Be Right Back”, about a woman whose dead boyfriend is brought back to robotic, sort-of life, via a digital reconstruction of his personality using his tweets and emails. “The Waldo Moment” told the story of a computer-operated cartoon bear who is entered into a local election as a joke, but then wins it on a protest vote – and unexpectedly becomes a totalitarian dictator. And Robert Downey Jr, no less, optioned the film rights to Peep Show writer Jesse Armstrong’s episode “The Entire History of You”, an unnerving vision of the future in which people can digitally record and replay all their memories.
But, whereas Downey Jr is still working on his adaptation, Netflix is giving Black Mirror a film-like makeover now. The company’s lack of ad breaks and more generous budget, which is thought to run to around £3million per episode, mean the series now employs many of the techniques and craft of cinema. On top of which, three of the six new episodes have been directed by established filmmakers.
Joe Wright, of Atonement and Anna Karenina fame, took charge on the social-mediaenvy satire “Nosedive”. Dan Trachtenberg followed up his debut feature, 10 Cloverfield Lane, with “Playtest”, an eccentric horror romp set partly inside a video game. And Watkins, of The Woman in Black, handled “Shut Up and Dance”, a punishingly tense thriller in which secret online sins come back to haunt their perpetrators.
Wright’s invitation arrived last year, following the release of Pan, a JMBarrie reboot over which the 44-year-old Bafta winner sportingly admits he was “f------ crucified” by critics.
“Nosedive” follows a chirpy social climber, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who becomes obsessed with her personal rating on a social media app. Every “bad review” makes it harder for her to secure an apartment in a gated complex – and Wright, who’d endured a barrage of one- and twostar appraisals for the first time in his career, could feel her pain.
“It spoke to the experience I had with Pan, where I was basing my value on outside opinion,” he says. “If a bunch of critics – who in ‘Nosedive’ is everybody – decides they hate you, then you must be hateful. So I identified with Bryce’s character’s desperate wanting to be liked again.”
The episode was shot in a “terrifyingly perfect housing community” on South Africa’s