This review contains minor spoilers for Black Mirror episode 703: “Hotel Reverie”
When Black Mirror last dropped episodes in 2023, the film and TV industry was still pretending to care about diversity. Their go-to method was to take a well-worn property, plop in some new identities, let those actors get torn apart by racists and sexists online, fail to give those actors good material, and then blame diversity if the project wasn’t a record-breaking hit. We’re in the future now and even this is happening less and less. But there’s still plenty to critique in terms of Hollywood reboot culture — especially when factoring in AI.
Alas, Black Mirror is rarely a show of depth or sharp critique. It wants to be Rod Serling with iPhones but it’s more college stoner saying wouldn’t it be crazy if xyz?? Every season there are a handful of interesting ideas and every season these ideas are let down by mediocre scripts. And yet even by those standards, season seven’s lesbian episode, Hotel Reverie, is an abject failure.
The episode begins with a fake trailer for a fake old movie called Hotel Reverie. It’s like Casablanca meets Gaslight with a splash of Brief Encounter. We then meet our protagonist Brandy Friday (Issa Rae), an A-list actress in the near-future who is tired of playing the love interest for “one of the Ryans.” She wants to be in real movies like the classics she adores — movies like Casablanca, Brief Encounter, and, yes, Hotel Reverie.
She’s in luck, because the owner of a failing classic studio (Harriet Walter) has been approached by an eager tech bro (Awkwafina) with the worst idea since colorization. Instead of spending the money to remake a classic, they can simply insert a new star into the old film with their Re-Dream technology.
The preposterous nature of the tech is unimportant since the goal is just to get Brandy into the world of a classic Hollywood melodrama Purple Rose of Cairo-style. And yet, as Black Mirror is wont to do, so much of its runtime is spent on this silly technology and even sillier plot mechanics.
Because this episode is about filmmaking of sorts, there’s metatext that reveals why this series so often falls flat. The Re-Dream technology has a small group of technicians who are tracking Brandy’s moves to ensure that the film’s narrative threads line up and the action can continue as planned or a new solution can be found that also works. It’s storytelling as a math problem, a need to justify all the moving parts with no attention paid to what best serves superfluous things like, I don’t know, character or theme or pacing. This is how show creator and episode writer Charlie Booker approaches screenwriting and it’s why so few episodes have any substance beyond a some fun ideas and a few satisfying twists.
Instead of critiquing the way Hollywood inserts people with different experiences into the same stories, Hotel Reverie just does this exact same thing. Before being transported into the movie, Brandy asks how it’s going to work to have a Black woman taking over the role in 1940s Cairo previously intended as a white male doctor. She’s informed that the technology means all of the characters will simply accept this new reality.
Rather than having the tech malfunction in a way that would force a more interesting narrative into the story, one of the technicians just spills his drink on the machine. Brandy is now trapped in the world of this faux-Casablanca as Alex, the Black woman doctor who is treated like a white man, alongside an AI that’s part Clara, the female lead, and part Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin), the actress who played her and soon after died tragically.
The rest of the film’s world is frozen, which removes another interesting concept — these two conscious semi-people navigating the fiction world like Jumanji — in favor of a GIF-ready montage of Brandy and Dorothy falling in love. We don’t even get to see this connection form! We’re not allowed a window into the way they might bond as two successful actresses from different times. We’re not even given any details about Dorothy’s death which seemed like such an easy opportunity to explore what it was like for a closeted actress during this time. No, we get a montage.
And then the tech is back on and we’re with Awkwafina and her crew trying to solve the plot to get Brandy out of the computer before it kills her IRL. Because of how time works in this simulation — something explained in exposition — Brandy has been with Dorothy for a long time, so there’s a sort of Solaris plotline of whether Brandy wants to stay with the woman she loves who isn’t real or return to regular life. But do we really care about this love since their connection was only shown in montage? Personally, I did not.
By the time this new Hotel Reverie reaches its conclusion, everyone in the tech room is moved to tears. The message is somehow that this experiment has succeeded. The only danger shown is the tech since it almost killed Brandy, while the real-life danger and questionable morality of real-life AI and CGI changing film and using the likeness of actors is completely ignored.
It’s fun to see Issa Rae in a suit. It’s fun to see Emma Corrin put on the cadence of classic cinema. It’s fun to watch them kiss. But are lesbian audiences really that easy? Are we so vapid to celebrate these aesthetic pleasures without asking for more?
At one point, Walter’s studio head says she hates when people refer to films as content. But, in this case, it’s the only word that applies. Black Mirror is just content. Hotel Reverie is just content. It has more in common with the tech it warns about than the art it references. This isn’t lesbian Casablanca — it’s a TikTok of objects getting smashed by a hydraulic press.
Black Mirror season seven is now streaming on Netflix.
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