The doorbell rings. A bespectacled man opens the door and finds a beautiful and half-naked young woman standing outside. She has been locked out of her apartment, she says. The man looks conflicted at her request to be allowed in — his wife is expected to return soon.
Suddenly, the film freezes. “Stop”, yells a moderator and gives the audience — at the Czechoslovak Pavilion in the 1967 Montreal World Fair — two choices: The man either lets the woman in, or says no. The viewers have been provided with special buttons — green for a yes, red for a no. The film progresses showing the scenario the majority has voted for.
The Czech film
Interactive films have evolved considerably since then. Films such as
Netflix had earlier experimented with interactive storytelling in children’s shows such as Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale and Buddy Thunderstruck , but Bandersnatch is its first interactive offering for adults and is appropriately couched within Black Mirror . The series has, in popular parlance, become a byword for the pervasiveness of the most preposterous aspects of technology and human nature.
Written by Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker and directed by David Slade, who also directed the episode ‘Metal Head’ in season four, Bandersnatch is a sci-fi psychological thriller that uses technology as an interface to explore questions of free will and the ability — or inability — to determine one’s fate, state and corporate surveillance, and the likelihood of parallel universes.
In a video featuring the cast and production crew, released shortly after the film, Todd Yellin, vice-president of product innovation at Netflix, says, “How about if we did a story about fascinating new technology that’s around fascinating new technology?”
Set, fittingly, in 1984, the film follows a young computer programmer named Stefan Butler, played by actor Fionn Whitehead, who was the lead in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017). Butler wants to adapt a classic novel, Bandersnatch by fictional author Jerome F Davies, into what he believes will be a ground-breaking computer game. The novel itself is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) book, where the plot offers multiple options as it progresses, making the reader turn to a specific page in order to choose one of the story arcs. Butler then approaches the video game company Tuckersoft, run by Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhury of People Just Do Nothing fame), where he meets the celebrated game creator Colin Ritman (Will Poulter, last seen in Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit ). The pressure of the looming deadline to create the game and Butler’s unresolved grief at his mother’s untimely death cause him to unravel, but the circumstances under which he does depends on the viewer’s choices. As he tries to draw out a game based on choices that are, however, limited by his discretion, Butler grows uncomfortably aware of how his own actions are controlled by an unseen force.
Viewers are familiarised with the interactive element in the film, having been presented with seemingly trivial choices, such as what kind of cereal Butler’s character will have for breakfast. The choices quickly escalate in intensity and significance. At one point, viewers have to even decide who between Butler and Ritman will jump off a building.
Each choice seems to draw on the notion of the Butterfly Effect, where small changes have immense repercussions. If the viewer doesn’t click on any option, the film opts for a default choice and continues. There are five ‘official’ endings, along with an unsubstantiated number of conclusions to the film based on how viewers combine choices. The shortest path has a run-time of 40 minutes, whereas other paths are about 90 minutes long. For seamless transitions between the choices, the scenes have to be pre-cached, meaning they are downloaded ahead of time in anticipation of their use. As a result, the film isn’t available on older devices.
Because Black Mirror stories are not without heavy references to real-life events as well as its own previous episodes, Bandersnatch is rife with layers and subtexts. Bandersnatch itself is a character in children’s author Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass , to whom the film tips its hat through subtle yet evident signals. In 1984, British company Imagine Software went bankrupt in trying to pursue the creation of a game — yes, named Bandersnatch.
Though lacking a storyline that is compelling enough for the viewer to watch multiple scenarios of the film, Bandersnatch is still a novel viewing experience.
Viewers are compelled to make choices, uneasily wondering who is making the choices for them in turn.