Black Mirror Season 7 takes some cues from Old Hollywood romance in "Hotel Reverie," an episode that combines classic films like Casablanca and Brief Encounter with fictional AI moviemaking tech.
Issa Rae stars as A-list actor Brandy Friday, who's signed on to star in a remake of the vintage British film Hotel Reverie. There's just one catch: This isn't a normal movie shoot. Instead, thanks to a new system called Redream, Brandy's consciousness will be projected into Hotel Reverie. There, she'll replace the male lead, the dashing Dr. Alex Palmer, and act against AI constructs of the film's characters in real time.
Among these constructs is heiress Clara Ryce-Lechere (Emma Corrin), played by late actor Dorothy Chambers. Brandy's first interactions with Clara don't go as planned, leading her and director Kimmy (Awkwafina) to scramble to stay on Hotel Reverie's narrative track. But it's too late: Brandy's presence —and her mistakenly referring to Clara as Dorothy — alters something in Clara. As she becomes self-aware, and as a technical mishap halts production, she and Brandy embark on a love story of their own.
So how does their romance shake out, and what does Black Mirror have to say about the use of AI in filmmaking? Let's check into "Hotel Reverie" and break it down.
What happens to Clara/Dorothy in "Hotel Reverie"?
Brandy manages to stick to the script until a disastrous piano-playing sequence cools any attraction between her and Clara. From there, she has to improvise in order to win Clara back. That leads to the biggest divergence from the original film's plot: She calls Clara "Dorothy."
The mistake actually intrigues Clara, even after Brandy backtracks and tells Clara that she simply reminds her of a troubled acquaintance named Dorothy. Both Clara and Dorothy appear to have everything, Brandy tells her. But their envious surface was covering up a deeper sorrow.
The message strikes a deep chord with Clara. "What's true of [Dorothy] is also true of me," Clara says. "You know, it's silly, but sometimes a sense of such wretchedness seizes me, as though I'm connected to some fathomless sorrow reaching through time. Perhaps I was a tragic figure in some other life."
Clara's sentiments aren't just romantic melancholy. They're fragments of the real-life Dorothy's psyche leaking through the data. According to the Redream team, the AI construct drew from Dorothy Chambers' performance, which she in turn based heavily on her own life. So when Clara heard Dorothy's name, she connected to the echoes of Dorothy that are running through her AI's data set.
"She's grown a dimension," programmer Jack (Charlie Hiscock) explains.
Hearing Dorothy's name and subsequently growing a dimension gives Clara extra agency. She goes off-script and touches Brandy's hand in the hotel garden. The next day, she invites Brandy-as-Alex on their sightseeing tour of Cairo, when in the original Hotel Reverie, it's Alex who offers the invite first.
The "Dorothy" mishap is the first step on Clara's journey to self-determination, but she makes an even bigger leap when Jack spills his drink on one of Redream's computers (manufactured by TCKR, which also appears in Black Mirror episodes like "San Junipero," "Playtest," and more). The accident freezes all the AI constructs in Hotel Reverie except for Clara, whose extra dimension has pushed her from unaware construct into something more. After Brandy tells her the truth, Clara leaves the hotel and breaches the fringe of Redream's simulation, stepping into a dark void where she's exposed to the program's full data pool, which includes Dorothy's life.
Clara speedruns Dorothy's life — which is also hers — in a matter of seconds. She sees everything from tabloid rumors about a romance with her costar Ralph Redwell (Enzo Cilenti) to her real love for one of the women who worked on Hotel Reverie. She even witnesses Dorothy's death.
The revelations about Dorothy and about her own life not being real are the final steps to Clara gaining full agency. As the world remains frozen around her and Brandy, she steps up to the empty hotel bar's empty piano — a sight that movie Clara said brought her nothing but sorrow — and begins to play for herself.
How does Brandy and Clara's love story end in "Hotel Reverie"?
The piano isn't the only way Clara begins to reclaim her happiness and embrace her autonomy. She and Brandy, who can't leave Hotel Reverie until the end credits roll, also begin a whirlwind romance in the frozen movie. (The "San Junipero" vibes are strong here, not just because of the queer romance but also because of the simulated period piece setting.) One second in the real world translates to several hours in the movie world, so by the time the Redream team finally fix the system, Brandy and Clara have already confessed their love for one another.
But it's too late for the happy couple: Kimmy resets the film to moments after Brandy and Clara's first kiss, meaning Clara won't remember anything that happened after the world froze — including the truth about Dorothy and her relationship with Brandy. Still, Brandy, unsatisfied with both her personal and professional lives in the real world, hopes to stay in Hotel Reverie with Clara until they can rekindle their longterm romance in earnest, even though it would mean Brandy's death in the outside world.
However, Brandy will never get the chance to try. Through some narrative finagling, the Redream team and Brandy manage to fix a major plot hole that would have resulted in Alex's death at the end of the film. They should be home free until the credits, apart from one thing: Clara becomes a wild card, shooting her in-film husband and the police inspector in the hopes of saving herself and Brandy. Her actions result in her tragic death, and as Brandy weeps over her corpse, she says the iconic line that triggers the end credits: "I'll be yours forevermore."
Some time later, Hotel Reverie Reborn becomes a bonafide hit on the streaming service Streamberry (the Netflix parody first introduced in "Joan Is Awful"). Yet Brandy is still mourning a very real relationship.
Enter Redream, who send Brandy a mysterious package. In it, she finds a drive that plays footage from Dorothy's screen test that she'd watched at the start of the episode. The screen test sees Dorothy acting out a conversation into a phone, but the actor keeps talking about how she's waiting for the phone to ring, even if it isn't connected.
But what if it was? That's the second part of Redream's gift: a phone that hooks into the drive and allows Brandy to call this AI simulacrum of Dorothy. The two hit it off, and the episode ends with Dorothy telling Brandy that she has "all the time in the world" to talk to her, an echo of Hotel Reverie's closing, "I'll be yours forevermore."
It's a bittersweet ending, and definitely among Black Mirror's more hopeful offerings. But there's a slightly sinister undercurrent to it, too: This construct of Dorothy is separate from the Clara construct who became self-aware. She lacks the agency her predecessor had, and while Brandy could tell her the truth about who she really is and why they're talking, would that truly free Dorothy, or just make her yearn for escape from being what is essentially a conversation bot? Right now, she exists solely to talk to Brandy, and that doesn't seem like the most fulfilling start to a relationship for either party.
What does "Hotel Reverie" have to say about AI and Hollywood?
Based on its concept alone, "Hotel Reverie" seems poised to tackle the never-ending stream of reboots and remakes plaguing Hollywood, along with fears of AI replacing artists. Using AI to resurrect deceased performers has been a hot-button topic in Hollywood in past years, with movies like Alien: Romulus ill-advisedly bringing back late actors for posthumous performances. Elsewhere, director Joe Russo's (of the Russo brothers) comments about AI soon being able to make 90-minute films call to mind Redream's entire project: using AI to quickly regurgitate art that has already been made.
Despite this modern relevance, "Hotel Reverie" doesn't explicitly dive too much deeper into the ethics of Redream's project, choosing instead to focus on a technologically driven romance. (Besides, "Joan Is Awful" already tackles these kinds of issues pretty head-on.) Still, there is a cynicism to how Redream approaches its remakes: Just swap out one star and follow everything else to the letter. Even when Brandy is cast, there's no effort to reshape the story as a queer romance, and they simply hand-wave any conversations around race. Then, during the shooting process, story beats are treated as objectives ("exposition delivered," "backstory deployed") instead of meaningful moments to build to. It's storytelling by numbers in the hopes of making a quick buck.
It's telling, then, that the moments of Hotel Reverie Reborn that most make the Redream team focus are those that deviate from the story, including Brandy and Clara's conversation about Dorothy and Clara's death, which leaves no dry eye in the house. These moments, with real feeling and passion behind them, are the true art (even if there's still an exploitative aspect to how they were captured). Hey, maybe it's these deviations that made Hotel Reverie Reborn such a hit on Streamberry.
