David Farnor | On 23, Apr 2025

Black Mirror has matured and grown over the years – not always consistently, but certainly intentionally. Part of that growth, not unlike Inside No 9, has involved experimenting with different tones – including comedy and stripped-down survival thrillers, but also romance. Season 7 continues that welcome trend with what is almost a cousin to 2016’s San Junipero, itself a warm, beautiful tale of romance. Hotel Reverie is even more so.

The film is a gorgeous love story that plays out against the backdrop of black-and-white, 1930s Hollywood – literally. A-lister Brandy (Issa Rae) is frustrated with the state of her career, unable to get into a leading lady role that will satisfy her artistically – instead, she pines for the olden days of films such as, you guessed it, Hotel Reverie. A Casablanca-style weepie, it’s a melodrama that nobody remembers anymore and certainly doesn’t earn its owners, Keyworth Studios, any money. So when struggling studio head Judith (Harriet Walter) is approached by ambitious producer Kimmy (Akwafina) to remake the movie, Judith jumps at the chance – and so, too, does a surprised Brandy.

The twist? The remake won’t be done conventionally, but instead through Kimmy’s pioneering platform ReDream, an AI-powered bit of kit that scans the film and then recreates it digitally. As for Brandy, she just plugs herself into the simulator and then she acts it out in real-time as the film runs on rails through the scenes written and filmed decades ago.

It’s an inspired idea, one that raises all kinds of questions around AI, creativity, copyright, usage and original ideas. Those are smartly left to linger in the background, as instead we become invested in the connection that forms between brandy and “Clara”, the character played by the screen icon Dorothy Chambers (played, in turn, by Emma Corrin). At first, Brandy is starstruck by meeting Dorothy, so she forgets her lines and blunders through conversations – but that farcical comedy gradually gives way to unexpected depth, as her behaviour changes the AI simulator’s retelling of the film, as each of the other characters around her react.

All the while, the studio team are watching the monitors and trying to keep the narrative integrity in check, and the emotional chemistry between their two stars intact. It soon becomes clear that the latter, at least, isn’t going to be a problem.

Emma Corrin is superb as Dorothy, smouldering, vulnerable and charismatic at once as she digs into the backstory of a star who was a closeted lesbian and ended up dying by suicide. All that knowledge is held in the data banks of the AI, based on Dorothy’s performance as Clara. Brushing aside mere parody of 1940s screen acting, Corrin cuts through those layers with remarkable resonance, switching from coy and charmingly playful to haunting and tragic at the drop of a hat.

Issa Rae, too, is wonderfully human in a role that could have been two-dimensional. She’s funny and adept at physical slapstick, but most of all is sincere every second she’s on camera, whether that’s her enthusiastic passion for cinema, her yearning affection for Dorothy or her hyper-empathetic understanding that Dorothy isn’t just a computer programme.

Director Haolu Wang delivers a masterclass in storytelling, conjuring up luscious monochrome images with a wonderful eye for composition that recalls the golden era of Hollywood – and then upends it by freezing background characters while our main couple stay in motion. As the set drifts away and malfunctions, and pre-scripted edits unravel into nothingness, Wang strips back everything to the raw data of two souls connecting within a massive hard drive, then invests it with a bursting, swooning humanity that continues to echo far beyond ones and zeroes – and feels more real than you ever expected AI could.

 

 
Through a glass darkly (spoilers)

– Can you say The Purple Rose of Cairo? There’s more than a hint of that film’s existential profundity in the questions that Hotel Reverie raises – but with an added technological twist. Where Purple Rose queried what happens to a character when a story ends and the credits roll, Hotel Reverie muses on what makes AI artificial and what makes humans not?

– The hilarity of trying to keep the story on track quickly diverts into tragedy, as the film pauses for Brandy and Dorothy to truly fall in love (and Dorothy to realise that she’s a computer programme) only to be reset and for Dorothy to forget everything, while Brandy still remembers everything. Then as the story hurtles towards an ending that necessitates a fatality, and Brandy would happily have chosen to stay in that reverie permanently, Clara sacrifices herself for her love. That might been a bit too cold and fridgey, if it weren’t for the moving epilogue, which sees Brandy receive a special ReDream-enabled telephone that lets her call AI Dorothy within the film – and gives their romance a bittersweet way to live on. Who’s to say that even in this digital realm it’s less real and meaningful?

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