Bandersnatch, the latest movie in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror anthology, tells the story of Croydon teen Stefan Butler’s (Fionn Whitehead) journey into video game design. Or madness. Or murder. It’s up to you.
This dark sci-fi feature film regularly allows viewers to decide, through the magic of Netflix, how Stefan should act. This amounts to around five hours’ worth of footage for viewers to play with, and dozens of ways to ruin your character’s (or is that puppet’s?) life.
“Wrong path, mate.” These three words, uttered by enigmatic game designer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) when Stefan chooses a supposedly easy-win early in the plot, foretell exactly the sort of risks the interactive film expects you to take. There are no points for playing it safe. The film requires you to experiment, re-do narrative arcs and, ultimately, make mistakes.
In many ways, the makers of Bandersnatch have followed their own guidance. By eschewing traditional storytelling structures, the writers undertook a huge experiment. A complex web of plots, with interweaving stories and countervailing narratives, is difficult to conceive of, let alone write. For a series held in as high esteem as Black Mirror, attempting to maintain quality throughout a film that is effectively six times the length of an average episode would is risky to say the least.
This approach did lead to some shortcomings. It’s difficult to get attached to Stefan when you realise that his life can be merely re-started with the click of a button. Some of Black Mirror’s most poignant, frightening endings stem from the permanence of a character’s fate; White Bear and White Christmas most immediately spring to mind. Bandersnatch, with its instant rewind abilities, give a weightlessness to the decisions made along the course of the film. So what if Stefan suffers a grizzly fate? He can reappear, alive and well, seconds later.
Nonetheless, the ease of decision-making does not eclipse the joy of Black Mirror’s willingness to play with form and plot. The evolution of characters along parallel plots – cruel or kind, bloodthirsty or caring – leaves viewers with many novel choices, each slightly more self-aware than the last.
Bandersnatch has laid the groundwork for more adventurous entertainment across TV. Sure, it didn’t always square up to expectations, but it created an enjoyable, 21st Century water-cooler phenomenon like no other. Better still, the slew of positive headlines, media attention and viewing figures indicate to other studios that risk-taking can be rewarding for business.
Thanks to Bandersnatch, 2019 might just be the year when innovators in television make even more gambles than ever. As long as they’re willing to make mistakes along the way.
