Bandersnatch takes a passive viewing experience and makes it active, making the viewer responsible for poor Stefan's life, and even communicating with him as his mental state further deteriorates. Yeah, it's not really a movie, but it is fun. The choices you make can reveal your personality (are you a white hat or a black hat?) or how familiar you are with storytelling tropes (does choosing to accept or refuse the job offer make for a more compelling story?). The viewer gets to make a choice frequently throughout the film, the first of which takes place merely five minutes into the film: Frosted Flakes or Sugar Puffs? Eventually the mundane choices grow into mammoth, world-ending choices, each taking you to one of at least five alternate endings.

Part personality test, part screenwriting experiment, part meta-commentary on Black Mirror's pop culture impact itself, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch game-ifies the movie-watching experience into what feels like the next-step evolution of the sci-fi horror series. But in this decade, where movies have already become television and comic books, why not video games? But thanks to new technology implemented by Netflix, Black Mirror has made an interactive feature film that is effectively the antithesis to everything that film stands for.

Other than video games where choice becomes the rule apparent, choose-your-own-adventure in its purest form was never truly possible in other mediums like movies and TV. The result is an entertaining, and at times thrilling, immersive experience that transforms a gimmick into a game, and simultaneously compels and condemns the viewer for daring to be involved.īandersnatch has made headlines for its choose-your-own-adventure story structure, a storytelling gimmick that became popular in children's books in the '70s and '80s but never really evolved beyond its charming childish roots. It's a cautionary techno-tale typical of the bleak anthology series created by Charlie Brooker. But rather than allowing its audience to be a distant, apathetic voyeur, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch makes the viewer part of the experience, offering up various binary choices throughout the film that can change the story - sometimes to drastic effect. But as he dives deeper into developing his game, itself a choose-your-own-adventure game set to revolutionize the industry, his mental state begins to dangerously unravel. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is a choose-your-own adventure story that makes the viewer culpable for the doomed destiny of its protagonist: a young programmer named Stefan Butler ( Dunkirk's Fionn Whitehead) who attempts to adapt a sprawling fantasy novel into a video game in 1984. Black Mirror: Bandernatch is probably (hopefully) the closest we'll come to living through a Black Mirror episode - and that's not as bad as it sounds.

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