A weird mash-up of race, politics, sci-fi and comedy

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU Thursday, BBC3, 11.35pm

ROARING out of the traps like streaming hits Severance and Dear White People crossed with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – if you know your Houyhnhnms from your Brobdingagians, you’ll get the reference when you see it – this debut feature from rapper-turned-director Boots Riley was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and is as thought-provoking as it is scabrously funny. It’s plenty weird, too.

Best described as a surrealist sci-fi black comedy, it critiques both race and capitalism and comes complete with a soundtrack by lo-fi indiedance songstress Merrill Garbus, aka Tune-Yards, like Riley a denizen of Oakland, California.

Check out the cast list: alongside stars Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson you’ll see Danny Glover and former NFL star-turned-activist actor Terry Crews, and hear the voices of Forrest Whitaker, Rosario Dawson and Lily James.

Yes, that Lily James.

Stanfield, above, is Cassius Green, known to all as Cash, who lives in the garage of the Oakland house rented in turn by his uncle, Sergio (Crews). We don’t know it’s a garage until the automatic door opens as Cash is in bed with his artist girlfriend Detroit (Thompson). It’s just one of several neat visual gags.

Four months behind on his rent, Cash goes for a job with the same telemarketing company his friend

Sal (Jermaine Fowler) already works for. It is called Regal View and, to his surprise, he is hired. On his first day he’s told by old hand Langston (Glover) to try using what he calls his “white voice” when calling potential customers.

Cash tries it (stand-up David Cross provides the lip-synched vocals) and finds his “white voice” so effective that while Sal and colleague Squeeze (Steven Yeun) are organising the Regal View workforce in an effort to actually get paid, Cash is promoted to the rarefied Power Caller floor of the building.

There he finds himself selling cheap labour on a massive scale for clients such as Worry Free, an exploitative and dystopian multinational run by coke-snorting CEO Steve Lift (Armie Hammer, in one of the last films he made before becoming embroiled in sexual abuse allegations).

Meanwhile Detroit has joined the Left Eye Faction, a sort of Black Bloc activist grouping who daub a black line under their left eye and spray slogans on walls.

It’s when Cash is invited to meet Lift and attend a party at his house that things really take a turn for the weird, leading to a jaw-dropping denouement.