Does Black Mirror’s “Hotel Reverie” deliver a truly happy ending? That’s up for debate.
In this sapphic tale, A-list actor Brandy Friday (Issa Rae) is frustrated with being typecast and yearns for something timeless and romantic — like the Hollywood classic Casablanca.
Luckily for her, cash-strapped studio head Judith Keyworth (Harriet Walter) has agreed to use Redream software, which inserts modern stars into films of yesteryear for interactive remakes, in an effort to revitalize her floundering Keyworth Pictures.
Brandy jumps at the chance to lead a new version of her favorite film, Hotel Reverie, which finds her playing the gender-swapped hero Alex Palmer. The movie also stars her favorite actress, Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin), as her love interest, Clara. After entering an immersive, AI-generated version of the 1949 film, Brandy finds that sticking to the original story is easier said than done.
The project goes off the rails when Brandy misses an important cue, which creates a major plot hole that she must correct to trigger the end credits or risk being stuck in that alternate reality forever.
And just when things were starting to get back on track, an engineer spills his coffee on a computer server, taking Redream offline with Brandy still inside. Although the program is back up within minutes, months have passed for Brandy and Dorothy in Hotel Reverie, and they’ve fallen in love.
During the film’s climactic scene, Clara shoots and kills her husband — a serious deviation from the original story — and is fatally wounded after opening fire on a detective. As Clara dies in Brandy’s arms, Brandy, reluctant to leave Dorothy behind once the film ends, struggles to say her final line. But she eventually utters the words that free her from the simulation, and she wakes up in the real world still reeling from what just happened.
Despite the unintentional changes to the plot, the new Hotel Reverie is a streaming hit. And in a touching move, Kimmy (Awkwafina), the Redream representative who’d been coaching Brandy through filming, sends her a Redream package containing a rotary phone that allows her to talk to Dorothy, the actress who played Clara, anytime she wants.
Black Mirror creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker knew early on what he wanted in the episode’s final moments. “I knew exactly what the ending should be,” he tells Tudum. “That [Dorothy and Brandy] have this sort of long-distance romance, it felt bittersweet.”
With the pair reconnecting over the telephone, could this be the start of a new romance? “Brandy almost wanted to stay in that world,” Brooker notes. “It’s an open question as to what will happen next, because we’ve shown that there’s the ability to go in there, and who’s to say that they’ve been limited to that?”
Corrin, who plays Dorothy, says the ending highlights “the beauty of these two people who found each other in this extraordinary circumstance.” But it’s also sad because “the version of Dorothy that Brandy is talking to still exists in this bubble.”
Awkwafina notes that Brandy choosing to leave Redream’s remake of Hotel Reverie and later connecting with Dorothy via a rotary phone at the end of the episode is a “cool way of envisioning it, because we can't leave our lives to go live in an old movie.” Dorothy and Brandy’s phone calls are “also not healthy, but you don't want to forget. I thought that it was a bittersweet ending.”
Meanwhile, Rae, who portrays Brandy, calls it a “happy-ish ending” for her character.
“As a viewer, it is very bittersweet,” she explains. “I'm sad because I witnessed the connection that they had and the happiness that Brandy felt and both of them finally feeling seen.” However, Clara and Dorothy are “doomed to this ending that won't change. And Brandy has these feelings that she has the template for a connection that she would want and that she'd possibly seek in the real world.”
“There is a version where she becomes one of those people that falls in love with AI, and I don't want that for her,” Rae adds. “I hope maybe Brandy can take all the good parts of that connection and make something of it [in the real world].”
“I like to think I play a little bit better than that, but yes, it was,” Rae confirms. “It just got worse and worse as the scene progressed. I practiced the real song just to have remnants of it being played really badly. But the director, Haolu Wang, was like, ‘Nah, Brandy doesn't know anything.’ And so that was it.”
Not exactly. The episode sprang from several ideas floating in Brooker’s mind, including a horror story about someone restoring old footage of a silent vampire movie from the 1930s.
“I had this idea where someone’s restoring an old horror film, and they realize they can talk to somebody in the film,” Brooker explains. Another idea involved throwing a new actor into an old James Bond movie.
“I was discussing this a lot with [co-writer] Bisha K. Ali. We watched a couple of Bond movies that I hadn’t seen for a while,” the executive producer says. “The joke was going to be, ‘Oh, there’s a dweeby person that accidentally ends up in the [film].’ It was like the wrong person getting thrown into the role of James Bond.”
Between the striking similarities to the Mike Myers-led Austin Powers trilogy and the huge budget a Bond parody would require, however, that idea just didn’t pan out. But then Brooker watched the 1940s British romance-drama Brief Encounter, and the story for “Hotel Reverie” finally took shape.
“I thought, ‘Oh, classic romance. What about a vintage romance? That’s the thing to do,’” he recalls. “A vintage romance movie, that’s a simpler story. And there’s something a little Back to the Future [about it], like you’ve disrupted a story, and you’ve got to get it back on track.”
Season 7 of Black Mirror is now streaming on Netflix.
