🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
You’ll never watch a beautifully shot true crime documentary the same way again.
“Loch Henry,” the pure nightmare-fuel second episode of Black Mirror Season 6, takes us to the breathtaking but unforgiving Scottish countryside. A pair of ambitious young filmmakers, Davis (Samuel Blenkin) and Pia (Myha’la Herrold), visit Davis’ idyllic hometown near the fictional Loch Henry, to see Davis' mother Janet (Monica Dolan) and to film a high-minded nature documentary about a local egg hoarder, which sounds… riveting.
But the couple stumbles upon a much juicier story when Pia learns more about the once tourist-friendly town, which was rocked by a series of eight murders 20 years earlier by a menace named Iain Adair (Tom Crowhurst). Pia, savvy enough to know a bombshell when she sees one, convinces Davis to pivot into filming a true crime story instead, aware that it’ll blow the wee egg story out of the water. The tale gets even more irresistible when she learns Davis has a personal connection to the subject: Davis’ policeman father, Kenneth (Gregor Firth), died of an infection as a result of being shot by Iain Adair.
As the couple investigates, interviewing locals and watching local news footage provided by Davis’ friend and local pub manager Stuart (Daniel Portman), it turns out Davis’ connection to the murder is even deeper than he thought — and the long-solved murder spree isn’t quite so solved.
Murderers, plural. Three of them. Iain Adair was indeed guilty of murder, but he didn’t act alone, as everyone had assumed over the years. The true ringleaders, who were never apprehended until the documentary uncovered the truth, were Davis’ late father, Kenneth, and his now-grieving widow, Janet, who apparently traded in her baking apron for a sexy nurse costume and her spatula for a power drill to torture their victims — all set to the soundtrack of ’90s hip-hop.
Back in the day, Richard (John Hannah), Stuart’s dead-eyed father and the owner of the local pub, witnessed Iain Adair drunkenly confessing to the murders and, since Kenneth was police, Richard tipped him off. Kenneth raided Five Acres Farm, where Iain lived with his parents and hid the unholy trio’s torture dungeon. Kenneth then shot Iain and his parents to cover his tracks. He also shot himself in the shoulder so he could frame Iain for his parents’ murders and the previous ones. The local authorities soon discovered the dungeon and the bodies on the property. Kenneth and Janet went unsuspected for years.
The fact that Kenneth died of an infection from the shoulder wound seems to be the only true part of the story Davis was told.
After Davis gets injured in a car crash, Pia finds herself stuck eating shepherd’s pie alone with Janet. That’s also when she discovers the footage of Kenneth and Janet gleefully torturing their victims. Pia, unable to get cell reception in rural Scotland, makes a run for it in the night. As Janet trails her down a country road, Pia slips while crossing a stream and hits her head on a stone with a crack that does not sound good.
In case you were rooting for Pia to somehow survive, it’s tragically revealed in the end that Pia is indeed dead — a victim of both Janet and the slippery terrain.
However, Janet doesn’t realize Pia is dead, and when she believes her son’s girlfriend has gotten away, she throws an epic cursing fit. “What was genuinely surprising was hearing Monica say the C-word,” Herrold tells Tudum. “That word shook me to my core. And it was so hard not to scream and laugh out of discomfort while she was doing it because it was so arresting.”
We can only speculate as to what’s going on in Janet’s mind, but it’s interesting that she agrees to appear in Davis and Pia’s documentary in the first place. Maybe she still wants revenge on Iain Adair for Kenneth’s death. “Monica’s performance was so heart-wrenching,” says Herrold. “I think she thought justice needed to be served because in some way it was still Iain Adair’s fault that her man was gone… you have to be a psychopath to think that.”
Then there’s the fact that when Janet thinks that Pia has gotten away and is about to expose her, she lovingly lays out old Polaroids of the victims, dons the creepy carnival mask and hangs herself. We learn at the very end that Janet left a note for Davis, writing, “For your film. Mum.” It turns out that Janet genuinely cared about her family — just in the sickest way imaginable. “I like the idea that she’s living a life where she’s lying to herself about what happened,” Blenkin tells Tudum. “That’s the disturbing thing for me.”
In the coda to the episode, we see Davis and an entire production crew accept a BAFTA for the documentary, which was released by Streamberry. (Hello, shared universe!) From the fraught look in Davis’ eyes, we sense the human cost of true crime stories, no matter how slickly produced or packaged.
“True crime documentaries look so high-end now,” Black Mirror writer and creator Charlie Brooker previously told Netflix. “They’re so classy-looking that it helpfully disguises what you’re there for. You know what you’re there for. You’re there to have a good old bloody gawp. True crime docs are like a gourmet burger in that respect. You’re still eating something full of fat and salt, but because it’s called an artisan burger, you almost feel good about yourself rather than like a horrible pig.”
Better an artisan burger than Janet’s shepherd’s pie.
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