Black Mirror has returned! The series we all know and love for making us question our use of technology and how our choices and interactions are affected by new developments has come back onto Netflix with something completely different: an interactive feature-length called Bandersnatch. This instalment isn’t really for watching but playing, picking options for the main character, Stefan, and seeing how this effects the outcome.

I can’t really tell you much about the plot because everyone’s experience is going to be different. It begins in 1984 with Stefan pitching a new game to a company, a choose-your-own-adventure based on a book called Bandersnatch. Stefan struggles with his mental health and sees a therapist on a regular basis whilst also having the support of his father whom he lives with. The rest of the story develops depending on your decisions.

This style of gaming/storytelling is well-known, made most popular by the Telltale games and David Cage’s creations such as Detroit: Become Human. The concept for Bandersnatch is interesting because, like the aforementioned games, you want to make the right decisions to have the best possible outcome. Keeping in mind this is a Black Mirror creation, I found myself making decisions knowing that there was bound to be some kind of twist and almost straying to the less conventional options because the conventional ones may have had the worst possible outcome (they want me to say yes to joining the game development team? Ha! Think again!).

What makes Bandersnatch lose its punch is that it gives you the option to go back to a point where you may have chosen the ‘wrong’ direction and you can redo this point to see where it takes you. By letting you do this, it feels like you’re never going to reach the ending, if there even is an ending. It gets confusing, and I found myself asking ‘is this over? Have I reached the conclusion?’. I reached a point where the credits rolled but I still don’t know if that’s the definitive ending, and if that was the definitive ending, it wasn’t very satisfying.

There’s a heavy amount of breaking the fourth wall in Bandersnatch which, again, adds to the confusion. You forget what point you reached or how much Stefan will remember from previous decisions. There is a theme where there’s always alternate realities or there’s always going to be an alternative option in some other timeline, so it doesn’t matter what happens in the current timeline you’re playing. If you get to redo certain parts, and if Stefan is aware he’s being controlled, it’s easy to lose track which point you’re redoing and if Stefan is aware of the viewer. As much as I enjoyed the fourth-wall breaking, it didn’t seem to be part of the ‘main’ story-line, if there even was one, so it was more like a fun little extra branch.

Bandersnatch is an interesting concept but it gets messy and complicated with the many different options and the redo ability. It lacks streamlining and it would be preferable with a definitive ending or with an overall concept instead of a ton of different concepts thrown into one. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, but it could be better.

Director: David Slade
Stars: Fionn Whitehead, Craig Parkinson, Alice Lowe
Lauren Jones
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