Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the first feature-length film in the Black Mirror sci-fi anthology, is now available to stream on Netflix. But if you’re not sure if it’s something that you could manage watching, then take a look at its chilling trailer first.
The one-and-a-half-minute clip starts with the main character Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) consulting Dr. Haynes (Alice Lowe) about the recurring weird dreams he’s been having lately. While the therapist isn’t able to determine the cause of Stefan’s strange dreams, the latter’s latest project as a video game developer might be the trigger of it all.
As revealed in the trailer, Stefan is working on an adventure game called Bandersnatch, which is based on a fantasy novel of the same name written by Jerome F. Davies. Stefan becomes obsessed with the author as he is seen reading a biographical book entitled The Lives of Jerome F. Davies.
While discussing Bandersnatch with his colleague Colin (Will Poulter), Stefan calls Davies a “genius” — a description that Colin finds unfitting given the writer’s murderous past. “Is he that bloke who went cuckoo and cut his wife’s head off?” Colin asks Stefan.
Sadly, Stefan has become too invested in Davies’ life to end his fascination with the writer abruptly. In fact, at the latter part of the trailer, Stefan goes on to watch a disturbing documentary about the novelist’s descent into insanity. With Stefan’s extreme fixation on Davies, a lot of Black Mirror fans feel that the video game programmer would be walking down a similar path.
Jerome F. Davies does not appear to be a real author, but there’s actually a Bandersnatch video game advertised in 1984 — the same year in which the movie is set. According to UK’s Daily Express, Bandersnatch was being developed by a company called Imagine Software. But because the video game publisher went bankrupt, the so-called mega-game, which would supposedly become the pioneer of the next generation of games, was never completed.
Directed by David Slade, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch also stars Asim Chaudhry as Stefan’s boss, Mohan Tucker.