Black Mirror, season 3, San Junipero, review: 'Charlie Brooker's dark sci-fi has never felt bigger'
Robbie Collin, film critic
21 OCTOBER 2016 • 7:19PM
With its move to Netflix from Channel 4, its ad breaks duly shed, and its season length doubled to an invitingly bingeable six-pack, Black Mirror has never felt bigger. Though conceptually speaking, Charlie Brooker’s dark science-fiction anthology series has always been a heavyweight.
Tall tales of technology that lay bare human frailties and foibles can hit their targets with wincing accuracy irrespective of budget – though here, in its third season, you sense a newly cinematic spring in the show’s step, as if its visual ambitions are suddenly able to keep pace with its narrative zap.
For the most part, San Junipero takes place in a fictional Californian resort town in what a radio broadcast chirpily informs us is late 1987. (Brooker has already said he deliberately set his opening episode in America to antagonise longstanding fans who complained the show had sold out.) We’re eased in via a luxurious descending crane shot of a cobalt convertible pulling up outside a fast food joint, while Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth fizzes on the stereo. Between its high-spirited occupants we spy a demure 20-something on the pavement, rocking the Scarlett-Johansson-in-Ghost-World look: this is Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis), the Cinderella of the piece.
San Junipero is a party town, though there’s something reticent about Yorkie’s mood, almost as if there’s somewhere else – quieter, less bustling – she’d far rather be. That begins to change, though, with the arrival of Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a life-and-soul type whose wide, flashing eyes promise the kind of fun you could normally only imagine. After meeting in a nightclub, the two women’s talk quickly turns flirtatious – although for reasons left initially unexplained, they only have until midnight before Kelly has to be… well, somewhere else.
The entire episode drives towards a grand unveiling of what this romance, and this place, actually are – although Brooker drops so many hints in the script, along with certain soundtrack choices during a period-accurate makeover montage, that the game’s all but given away too early. (The central conceit has already been extensively explored in science fiction, not least by Iain M Banks.)
Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Kelly, with Mackenzie Davis as Yorkie CREDIT: DAVID DETTMANN/NETFLIX
The director is Owen Morris, whose previous Black Mirror episode – the second-season opener Be Right Back, with Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson – featured one of the series’ most persuasively complex portraits of a romantic partnership. By comparison, Yorkie and Kelly rarely ring true – their dialogue might as well come with the disclaimer A Straight Man Speculates About Lesbians, although a wryly allusive cut away from a love scene to waves wetly lapping at the beach feels more romantic in context than you might expect.
But what holds your interest is Mbatha-Raw – no surprise to those of us who fell for her in Amma Asante’s Belle and Gina Prince-Bythewood’sBeyond the Lights – who brings enough vivacity and conviction to what’s essentially a cipher of a role for the proudly tearjerking ending to land with a satisfying emotional thwack.
Even a veiled explanation as to why would risk blundering into spoiler territory, so let’s instead just applaud Black Mirror’s admirable willingness, for a show that’s always felt rational to its core, to juggle the kind of existential concepts that tend to be the preserve of the religiously inclined. San Junipero may drop the odd metaphysical bean-bag along the way, but its showmanship is beyond reproach.
THE TELEGRAPH
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