Black Mirror: Hotel Reverie
April 10, 2025 11:49 AM - Season 7, Episode 3 - Subscribe
A high-tech, unusually immersive remake of a vintage British film sends Hollywood A-list star Brandy Friday into another dimension, where she must stick to the script if she ever wants to make it home.
Brandy's address on the box is Junipero Drive so there is an overt connection between the two episodes.
posted by miss-lapin at 8:32 PM on April 11
posted by miss-lapin at 8:32 PM on April 11
This episode doesn't just reference San Junipero, but also Joan is Awful as it's the same netflix knockoff company, Streamberry, that releases Hotel Reverie Reborn.
posted by miss-lapin at 8:39 PM on April 11
posted by miss-lapin at 8:39 PM on April 11
I loved this but Issa Rae just seemed very wooden. A great story though.
posted by berkshiredogs at 5:23 PM on April 12 [5 favorites]
posted by berkshiredogs at 5:23 PM on April 12 [5 favorites]
They really got the look of the film right, including the hairstyles, which is usually where the anachronism shows through.
posted by larrybob at 10:23 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
posted by larrybob at 10:23 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
Really liked this one. Fun concept, executed fairly well.
Yeah I think Issa Rae didn't do so good at the serious actor parts. They needed someone who could turn it off and on, from like smoldering to comic, because her character is kind of all over the place. They leaned a little too much into sort of bumbling and smiling which seemed at odds with her being a great ambitious actress. Plus sudden changes in demeanor are just funnier. I think she did well by the end though when it mattered most.
posted by fleacircus at 3:18 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
Yeah I think Issa Rae didn't do so good at the serious actor parts. They needed someone who could turn it off and on, from like smoldering to comic, because her character is kind of all over the place. They leaned a little too much into sort of bumbling and smiling which seemed at odds with her being a great ambitious actress. Plus sudden changes in demeanor are just funnier. I think she did well by the end though when it mattered most.
posted by fleacircus at 3:18 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]
First one of this season I enjoyed.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:11 PM on April 19
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:11 PM on April 19
I thought there were good, interesting, poignant ideas in here, and I wish we could've spent more time dwelling on them… except they were inside of a house built entirely with popsicle sticks and worn-out sci-fi tropes.
I can only guess they were intentionally crossing over into parody territory — “crew” members announcing bizarre narrative metrics for no reason than for exposition, the magical power of coffee to pause everything, and NCIS levels of furious typing in order to solve problems.
There were lots of arbitrary rules that were erected only so that they could tell this story. Dorothy would be stuck in jail forever if she got arrested, but somehow she's allowed to take her own life. When the coffee spills, the time scale speeds up (from external perspective; from inside it slows down) so that Brandy and Dorothy can have enough time to fall in love; but the in-universe why of it is reduced to a throwaway line. Individual episodes of Black Mirror seem to disagree over whether nubbin-on-temple immersive VR experiences are safe or dangerous; in this one Brandy has to be reawakened from the outside after having delivered the final line… or else she could die, for some reason that nobody explains?
I think I recognize the fingerprints of the ST:TNG episode “The Inner Light”: in a matter hours, Picard gets to experience a man’s entire adult life and is transformed by the experience. Picard's kicker at the end is when he receives the flute he learned to play as Kamin; Brandy's is the gift of the phone conversation, and because it's Black Mirror it lands a little more cynically. Is it meaningful or parasocial? Does it evoke the life lessons Brandy learned in the quiet time she spent with virtual Dorothy, or is it just a way to spend more time obsessing over a dead actress’s pain?
Brandy dances around this idea, wondering if she's the object of Dorothy's affection because Dorothy is programmed that way. But people crush hard on the Colin Firths and Manic Pixie Dream Girls that Hollywood has to offer precisely because they represent wish fulfillment, so the programming can go both ways. (Roger Ebert described Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State as “a local girl who is one of those creatures you sometimes find in the movies, a girl who is completely available, absolutely desirable and really likes you.”)
posted by savetheclocktower at 8:28 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]
I can only guess they were intentionally crossing over into parody territory — “crew” members announcing bizarre narrative metrics for no reason than for exposition, the magical power of coffee to pause everything, and NCIS levels of furious typing in order to solve problems.
There were lots of arbitrary rules that were erected only so that they could tell this story. Dorothy would be stuck in jail forever if she got arrested, but somehow she's allowed to take her own life. When the coffee spills, the time scale speeds up (from external perspective; from inside it slows down) so that Brandy and Dorothy can have enough time to fall in love; but the in-universe why of it is reduced to a throwaway line. Individual episodes of Black Mirror seem to disagree over whether nubbin-on-temple immersive VR experiences are safe or dangerous; in this one Brandy has to be reawakened from the outside after having delivered the final line… or else she could die, for some reason that nobody explains?
I think I recognize the fingerprints of the ST:TNG episode “The Inner Light”: in a matter hours, Picard gets to experience a man’s entire adult life and is transformed by the experience. Picard's kicker at the end is when he receives the flute he learned to play as Kamin; Brandy's is the gift of the phone conversation, and because it's Black Mirror it lands a little more cynically. Is it meaningful or parasocial? Does it evoke the life lessons Brandy learned in the quiet time she spent with virtual Dorothy, or is it just a way to spend more time obsessing over a dead actress’s pain?
Brandy dances around this idea, wondering if she's the object of Dorothy's affection because Dorothy is programmed that way. But people crush hard on the Colin Firths and Manic Pixie Dream Girls that Hollywood has to offer precisely because they represent wish fulfillment, so the programming can go both ways. (Roger Ebert described Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State as “a local girl who is one of those creatures you sometimes find in the movies, a girl who is completely available, absolutely desirable and really likes you.”)
posted by savetheclocktower at 8:28 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]
This didn't quite work for me, mainly for the decision to play out essentially the whole romance in a montage.
We got a brief implication that Dorothy had become whole but no real understanding of how real she was. And then she's gone. Ultimately her death at the end didn't actually matter; she had already been killed by the reset; the months of her wiped away in moments.
That said, it was a fun ride. It reminded me a little of the excellent game Immortality, but that was ultimately much more interesting.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 1:32 PM on April 23
We got a brief implication that Dorothy had become whole but no real understanding of how real she was. And then she's gone. Ultimately her death at the end didn't actually matter; she had already been killed by the reset; the months of her wiped away in moments.
That said, it was a fun ride. It reminded me a little of the excellent game Immortality, but that was ultimately much more interesting.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 1:32 PM on April 23
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posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:04 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]