Brandy (Issa Rae) enters the remake of a Hollywood classic in one of the weakest episodes in the anthology series’ canon. Here’s our Black Mirror: Hotel Reverie review.
It’s probably a cliché to say Black Mirror’s weakest episodes are those with the largest budgets. It’s also can’t be entirely true – USS Callister (whose sequel, Into Infinity, we’ll see at the tail-end of this season) is well-liked even if it lacks some of the satirical series’ sharper edges.
Hotel Reverie, in which modern film star, Brandy (Issa Rae) is hired to remake a Casablanca-esque classic in real time, lacks neither money nor ambition. Taking place largely in a black-and-white reconstruction of a 1940s Cairo hotel, our hero is placed into a virtual world based on the film’s script – complete with a digital recreation of the movie’s troubled star, Emma Corrin’s Dorothy. When the action goes off-script, Brandy must find a satisfying way to end the story or find herself trapped in the film forevermore.
AI, celebrity culture and Hollywood history battle for prominence over a luxurious 76-minute runtime in which almost nothing seems to land as intended. As the project manager (Awkwafina) talks Brandy through this bizarre system of deepfake-with-extra-steps, we’re left wondering why anyone would bother making (or watching) a film like this at all.
Rather than dig into the redundancy of the entertainment industry’s modern remake culture, the plot bends over backwards to justify its central premise in a way that never quite clicks. For a show often piercingly perceptive – even prescient – in dealing with current social and technological issues, Hotel Reverie’s image of the entertainment industry would have felt outdated a decade ago.
Read more: Black Mirror season 7 episode 2: Bete Noire review
Issa Rae – brilliant in last year’s American Fiction – therefore has the impossible task of justifying the episode’s existence, and spends most of the runtime simply looking lost. It would require an Herculean feat of comedy acting chops to make the scenario – in which she awkwardly fumbles around the original film’s cast – elicit any emotion beyond embarrassment. Rae doesn’t manage it, even as Emma Corrin leans solidly into her impersonation of a 1940s movie star.
It hurts all the more because there’s so much material in modern Hollywood’s relationship with capital, technology and nostalgia that an episode riffing on those themes should be an easy blockbuster. But Hotel Reverie feels like a first draft of that story. We can applaud it for its ambition; we can’t applaud it for much else.
Black Mirror is streaming on Netflix now. Check out reviews of the rest of series 7 here.
