Taking a bit of a break from the movies today and covering a TV special instead. It's the season for it, after all - we all have our holiday favourites that worm their way into our lives and become part of our festive consciousness. In twenty minutes or so, I'll be taking a break from writing to watch Famous Fred, Joanna Quinn's glorious adaptation of Posy Simmonds' book, and later today I'll be pulling out my copy of the adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather and eagerly scanning the schedules to see what day I have to get up at stupid o'clock so as not to miss Olive, the Other Reindeer.
None of these, it has to be said, have a lot in common with the near-future techno-horror that is Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. There's been a couple of series of this so far, each containing three self-contained stories linked by the central theme of modern life being lived via electronic screens. These are the black mirrors of the title, and they seldom reflect much that we can like about ourselves. Some episodes are darkly funny, some are just dark, and together, they represent what for my money has to be some of the most disturbing material ever to reach the small screen.
When I heard last year that they were making a Christmas special, therefore, my first thought was How on earth are they going to top the one about the Prime Minister fucking the pig? A year later and unwillingly wiser, I now find myself thinking Bloody Hell, I hope this one doesn't come true as well.
Black Mirror: White Christmas starts inside a cottage in the middle of a snowy wasteland, where smooth-talking Matt (Jon Hamm) and sullen, shell-shocked Potter (Rafe Spall) are preparing to spend Christmas in isolation. Craving conversation that Potter is reluctant to provide, Matt attempts to initiate dialogue by telling him about the days when he used to work as a pick-up artist.
What follows is an anthology of sorts, with three short stories linked by segments set within the cottage with our two main protagonists. This sounds a little bit Twilight Zone: The Movie, I guess, and the first section, a hokey and predictable cautionary tale, led me to worry that this might be exactly what I was getting. However, as the rest of the story (and the stories-within-a-story) unfolds, it becomes increasingly obvious that Black Mirror: White Christmas is puzzlebox storytelling of the highest order, every bit as accomplished as the superb Cabin In The Woods, albeit several orders of magnitude nastier. This is world-class knife-twisting, absolutely relentless in the way that each deliciously repellent surprise expands into the next like some sort of glorious fractal of existential terror. Every time, you think it can't possibly get any worse. Every time, it does, and if you're brave enough to turn the lights off while the end credits are still playing you're made of sterner stuff than I am.
It would be easy to conclude that Brooker is, bluntly put, something of a sick fuck. Maybe he is. Maybe surrendering ourselves to the inevitable bulldozing of our private selves by communications technology is the route to a brighter future. Maybe, just maybe, everything really will be okay.
Merry Christmas, everybody. Now FUCK OFF.
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