“Hotel Reverie” is the third episode of Black Mirror’s seventh season. Very quickly, it seems to want to mimic some of the storytelling and themes from “San Junipero”, one of the best episodes of the series, but falls flat in doing so.
SPOILERS for Black Mirror season seven episode three below.
The episode opens with a black and white film that tells a love story between a James Bond like character who is a doctor named Alex Palmer and a young woman who is the heir to a massive company and is named Clara Ryce-Lechere. The film is called Hotel Reverie and is considered a classic film similar to Casablanca.
We then learn that the studio that created the film is now very much struggling in the modern day. They are just a few days away from shutting down entirely, but a new company wants to buy their IP and remake old movies. This mysterious company is called Redream and they claim they will only need about ninety minutes of an actor’s time to remake a whole movie.
We’re then introduced to the main protagonist of the episode, Brandy Friday played by Issa Rae. Issa is an actress who seems to be pretty successful, but she doesn’t like how she’s been typecast either as the feme fatale or a broken woman. She wants to have the lead in something that will be considered a class just like Hotel Reverie was. Her agent brings up the fact that Hotel Reverie is being remade, but Brandy does not want anything other than the lead role as Alex meaning the studio would need to race and gender swap the main lead, something that is perfectly normal in Hollywood, but the studio didn’t intend on doing. She has her agent reach out and is given the role because the “Ryans” weren’t available.
Her job is to memorize every line that Alex says in the movie and she’s supposed to do this within three days. I’m no actor, but this seems like an impossible task. However, Brandy does this with ease.
The episode really reinforces the idea that Brandy is seen as more of a side character in most of her popular movies when the script is delivered to her. The delivery woman brings up multiple examples of movies she liked that Brandy was in, but always mentions how great the male lead was, not Brandy.
The following Monday, Brandy shows up to the studio ready to go and the exposition is delivered that tells us where the science fiction angle is coming from and how the remake of the movie will only need ninety minutes of her time. Redream has developed software that takes a movie and all the characters in it and creates a simulation that runs the movie. Brandy’s consciousness is transported into that simulation in the role of Doctor Alex Palmer. Everyone in the simulation will assume she is Alex Palmer, and Brandy asks how people who believe they are in the 20s or 30s would react to a black woman seducing a white woman.
At this point, I thought the episode was going to take a much darker turn and do exactly that. The simulation is programmed so that every character sees her as Alex Palmer and thinks nothing of her gender or race in regards to her actions. I thought the simulation was going to malfunction and the remake of the film would end up being a story about racism and sexuality within decades past, possibly commenting on historical accuracy in film and what the mindset of characters would be like when diverse characters are put into non diverse times. This would essentially keep the romantic angle of the story, but turn the setting into something of a manhunt adding a horror element to it.
That’s not where it went at all.
Instead, we see things play out pretty much exactly as they are supposed to for a while. Brandy plays Alex, delivers the exact same lines from the original movie, until there are some accidental variations. For example, Alex plays the piano to impress Clara, so that’s what Brandy needs to do. Except, Brandy can’t play the piano, never thought to tell anyone and no one thought to check. So, instead, she has to play the piano terribly and try to pass it off as a joke.
There’s a pretty big focus on Brandy delivering Alex’s lines and performing his actions exactly as he did. If she doesn't, her actions or dialogue could accidentally create a plot hole in the story. For example, because she played the piano poorly, Clara never left the room meaning a poison drink was delivered to her, so Brandy/Alex had to quickly dump it out, but that caused a dog to drink it, etcetera, etcetera, essentially altering the entire plot of the movie. After all that, we learn that they can apparently just reset the simulation.
Why exactly the studio wants to make literally the exact same movie, a shot for shot remake, with literally the only difference being one single role is recast is beyond me. It doesn’t seem like a very lucrative venture and it certainly costs a fortune (consciousness uploading and simulation creation can’t be cheap).
Brandy is constantly going off script. She’s changing things left and right even though she has memorized all the lines and actions of her character. Somehow, this causes Clara to gain some sort of recognition that she is actually a character being played by an actress and she gains some of the actress’s characteristics. That then causes the system “to have triggered a stack overflow causing the exit code to… misbehave.” It’s a lot of poorly explained sci-fi jargon, but that’s okay because not everything has to be explained perfectly. The viewer is expected to roll with it as Brandy is trapped in the simulation.
Brandy now not only has to perform her lines right because it’s her job, but because she will be stuck there if she doesn’t. The only way to get her out is to get to the credits. The movie progresses with Brandy doing her best to be Alex and fill any plot holes, but then one of the techs spills his coffee on a computer, causing everything to malfunction. Now, the simulation is paused and so is everyone in it except Brandy and Clara. Why they aren’t paused is unexplained. Oh, and time also has started moving faster for them.
Essentially, as the Redream employees try to fix everything, Brandy and Clara fall in love. At first, Brandy is pretty rude to Clara, telling her she’s not a real person, she’s a character played by an actor in a simulation and so forth. Clara then is somehow able to leave the set into literal nothingness that also somehow allows her to access the internet and learn about the actress who she truly is. She even learns that the real her was hiding her true sexuality which played into her suicide. After months, Clara and Brandy fall in love.
Again, a lot goes unexplained. It's an interesting idea, but there’s just a lot of plot convenience. The constant mentioning of things like “narrative integrity”, “narrative stress”, the staring at charts while saying “story intact” or “backstory deployed” or “attraction building” makes the whole concept come off as a Rick and Morty episode taken too seriously.
To wrap things up, the story progresses differently than it was supposed to and Clara ends up sacrificing herself for Brandy. Brandy says the final line and is transported back into her own body. She does this quite reluctantly as she has fallen in love with Clara, but the relationship is not given enough time to really make it impact the viewer.
The remade movie is then released on Streamberry, Black Mirror’s version of Netflix, but it’s not explained if they released the movie in its altered state or if they refilmed. Brandy is sent a gift by the Redrea team that allows her to talk to Clara on the phone, a touching moment.
All in all, this episode feels like an attempt to recreate the feeling of “San Junipero” in a different way, but it fails to do so. The story has an over reliance on tech that is not explained enough to make it feel realistic, but at times is over explained when it doesn’t need to be. It’s definitely still entertaining like every episode of Black Mirror, but it is far from the series’ best.
5/10