Film Review: Black Mirror Series Four, Redux (Part 3/3)

Next one is a fun one... Black Museum.

The Premise

The titular Black Museum is a place where tech arctifacts and the horror stories that come with them, are displayed. Rolo Haynes is the proprietor, and he narrates some of these stories with a shocking twist at the end. Think of this episode as an episode of mini-episodes.

The Characters

Douglas Hodge is the narrator and antagonist Rolo Haynes. Where do I begin? This guy knocked it out of the park as the loathesome opportunistic sleazebag Haynes, what with the griping about human rights and off-color commentary. Can't give him all the credit, of course, the writing played a big part, but he carried it so well.

Leticia Wright as Nish. Wright recently played Shuri in Black Panther and Wakanda Forever. Here, she plays much the same character - plucky, snarky, good with tech. However, she also adds a more emotional bent to her character, and she's great to watch in the final quarter of the episode.

Daniel Lapaine as Dawson. Guy starts out as a well-meaning doctor who falls prey to the unintended side effects of tech. The actor did a pretty believable job of portraying, with his limited screen time, a healer-turned-psycho. Can I just say the actor's name is oddly apt? Lapaine. Heh heh.

This shot of him lying in a coma with a hard-on just seems very representative of what Black Mirror is as a whole - technology that is touted to improve our lives, turns out to have nasty side effects due to human beings being flawed and using it in terrible ways..

Emily Vere Nicoll as Dawson's concerned and long-suffering girlfriend, Madge. She really doesn't have much to do except look concerned, look repulsed and appear naked. I'm kind of sorry for the actress, to be honest.

Aldis Hodge plays Jack, the single father who faithfully raises his kid after the death of the kid's mother. He does come across as a man admirable in his consistency towards Carrie.

However, there's a limit to how much he can sacrifice and Black Mirror has a way of finding that limit. In particular, having Carrie's consciousness uploaded to his brain, where he has to hear her constantly, and lose his privacy twenty-four seven.

Alexandra Roach delivers a compellingly tragic performance as Carrie Lamasse. This one gave me mixed feelings. On one hand, I sympathized with the horror of her situation, especially when almost none of it is her fault exactly. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that if Carrie had just learned to be a little less noisy and less of an annoying backseat driver, it might not have come to this.

Yasha Jackson camps it up as bitchy new wife Emily. Sleek, sexy and venomous. She's not a nice person, but put in a situation though no fault of her own, and doesn't handle it at all well. Who would, really?

Babs Olusanmokun as Clayton Leigh. Stoic family man. Though I feel like the part near the end where he just drools and stares off into space is his best acting.

Amanda Warren as Clayton's wife Angelica. She does this nice emotional bit with Clayton during a prison visit - very heartrending. After that, the actress is basically reduced to cameos.

The Mood

It begins as a sunny day in some desert, but soon gets into the confines of the titular Black Museum.

The little flashbacks and stories span between mood whiplashes. Sometimes it's all nice and breezy in the day, and then flashes to a nightmare of blood and violence. A lot of it can be claustrophobic especially since a couple stories revolve around someone's consciousness being trapped in either a confined space or an inanimate object (or inside a living person but with no agency).

What I liked

All the little Easter Eggs that appear in this episode that harken back to previous episodes. Black Mirror has always had them, but this episode seems to have Easter Eggs to every single episode in Black Mirror ever, up to this point. We have news tickers referencing multiple previous episodes and displays in the museum doing the same (mugshots, exhibits, etc). The names of the mice are Hector and Kenny, two of the main characters in Shut Up And Dance. And near the end, we see a sly reference to the episode Be Right Back, when it's revealed that the name of the nearby gas station is BRB Connect!

And of course, there's TCKR, the company being featured in San Junipero. They feature pretty strongly here, too.

Nish charging up her electric car using solar power is a fun nod to Nosedive.

Who wrote Rolo's dialogue? Whoever they are, they deserve an award.

Eventually, he dick-pukes a little baby paste up her wazoo which takes hold. Before you know it, out pops a boy. Boom. They're a family unit.

The part where Nish whispers "Happy Birthday" to her dad is really heartwarming, not that it has anything to do with the overall plot.

The first mini-story was great. Started out as useful tech, segued into the applications for sex, and turned out to have tragic consequences.

I especially love the second mini-story where Jack loses his privacy and Carrie loses her agency. This is very characteristic of Black Mirror. In particular, Carrie's utterly horrible fate is to be trapped in an inanimate object, being able to only say "Monkey loves you" and "Money needs a hug".

That final mini-story now... that takes the proverbial cake. But it would have been a lot less flavorful without the earlier two stories giving it context.

What I didn't

Clayton Leigh is a little too calm when being executed. Granted, I don't know exactly how inmates on death row typically act, but it feels like it shouldn't be that stoic.

Conclusion

Black Museum has just about everything you could want in a Black Mirror episode - swearing and violence, human beings being dicks to each other and abusing technology in the worst ways possible, call-backs to previous episodes, nasty twists at the end (and because there are different stories in this one, -multiple- different nasty twists). I really enjoyed this one.

This is vintage Black Mirror, all right. Extra emphasis on human beings being scum. Love it!

My Rating

9.5 / 10

Final thoughts on Black Mirror Series Four

The first half of Series Four was decent, with Crocodile being one of my least favorite episodes while still managing to be watchable. 

However, Series Four really picked up its game with the latter half with Hang The DJ and Metalhead. And it had a hell of a strong finish with Black Museum. An improvement on Series Three, for sure. This just keeps getting better.

Monkey loves you,
T___T