Plot:
The premise of the second chapter of Black Mirror Season 3 is a much more self-explanatory one than the first: The titlecard “Playtest” flashes in front of us like an 8bit arcade game. The story is centred around Cooper (Wyatt Russell), an American 20 something-year-old who leaves his parents' house at the break of dawn and flies all around the world, ending up in London where he finds a listing for a gamers wanted sort of gig at “SaitoGemu”.
He is urged to take the job by his Tinder hook up (a call back to Nosedive’s swiping and rating social media monster), an ambitious tech reporter who offers him compensation for any insider pictures he manages to capture at the headquarters. When he arrives he’s escorted to the playtest room by an employee of SaitoGamu. He’s asked to sign a consent form for a “small medical procedure” (Warning Sign #1) and as Katie leaves the room for a few minutes, he takes back his phone, turns it on and takes a few pictures of all the documents.
Katie jokes that she hasn’t killed anyone yet so he doesn’t need to worry. (LOL) The first interactive augmented reality game is essentially 3D Whackamole and when it’s over he’s invited to meet the head designer. This is warning sign #2, echoing Ex Machine. Saito introduces him to the actual playtest, a personal survival horror game inspired by Resident Evil and Silent Hill which completely immerses the player.
The Harlech Shadow House is where the rest of the plot unfolds. Without being given any sort of guidelines or set of instructions apart from a single safeword, Cooper is told to stay in the house until he can no longer take it. He’s is a goofy man-child who cracks jokes to counteract his fear and serves as the perfect victim for this terrifying scenario.
One by one, the hijinks of the game appear: spiders, ghosts, humanoid monsters who resemble people from his past. It’s scary as f*ck but he navigates the house without giving up until Katie’s voice on his earpieces becomes distorted and then dies off. Then Sonja knocks on the front door, warning him to leave the house because he’s in danger.
Unable to decipher between virtual and actual reality, Cooper begins questioning why and how she was able to find him. Sonja turns into a vicious virtual ghost and they fight in the kitchen before she stabs him. Katie’s connection is restored but instead of getting him out she tells him to calm down. She explains the “neutral net” implanted at the back of his head was able to replicate physical experiences, which is unprecedented.
She walks him through the access point which is waiting behind a closed door on the second floor of the haunted mansion. It takes all the strength for him to open it and when he does Katie laughs in his ear, taunting him for blindly following her instructions. There is no access point. The door vanishes behind him and his memory starts becoming foggy.
He can no longer remember where or even who he is. He smashes the (black) mirror in front of him and tries to cut the implant out himself using one of the shards, as its tendrils embed themselves in his head “like roots threaten through his brain”. Katie enters the room and instructs, someone, to take him “with the others” but again, is this reality or is it the horror game?
He wakes up back at Saito's office, merely a second later from when the game began. They remark this was much more powerful than intended. Even though the game has been switched off, however, the ghosts are everywhere because the game has traumatised him. He travels back home and finally talks to his mother again only to discover she doesn’t remember him. As you may have suspected this isn’t the real reality either, it’s his worst nightmare: His mother having Alzheimer's just like his father did.
He’s finally pulled back into the original reality where Katie is still setting up the initial test in the white room. The call he received from his phone (which he switched on while Katie was away) intercepted the signal and caused him to have a stroke while he screams “mom” repeatedly.
Theme:
Taking a literal approach to the terrors of technology, Playtest puts its own spin on the horror scenario by replacing supernatural elements with augmented reality. Unlike horror films where the characters are thrown into a deadly situation against their will, Cooper was 100% aware of what was waiting for him at the Shadow house: his worst nightmares.
Familiar faces like the one of his mother literally come back to haunt him, no matter how hard he tries to get away from them and he ends up completely losing his identity. There’s no prewritten story in the game, it is dictated by what you fear the most like a Boggart. At one point, even Katie was transformed to a projection of his own subconscious, reading his thoughts out loud through the earpiece. The metaphor of him being afraid he'll get Alzheimer's was not a very subtle one but it was extremely effective and so was the ending.
Throughout the episode, he keeps resisting to call back his mom and talk to her and in the end the last thing he did before he died was call for his mother. How bleak!
Grade: 3.5/5
The classic elements of the horror genre like visual and sound effects, jump scares and playing with the audience’s anticipation were used cleverly even if the reality was shattered too many times for the viewer to take it seriously in the end.
In particular, the inception-esque narrative device of being pulled back to reality was brilliant every time it was used, especially in the end. Russel’s acting was excellent, even if I didn’t feel much empathy for the character.
Would anyone ever in their right mind willingly take part in this? I sure as hell would not because unlike any other medium of horror, this is one you can’t escape from. Virtual spiders crawling everywhere? I AM OUT. What were your thoughts on episode 3x2?
