Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Hayley Atwell, Damhnall Gleeson, Claire Keelan, Sinead Matthews, Flora Nicholson, Glenn Hanning, Tim Delap, Indira Ingram.
When a person dies, it is understandable for those left behind to feel so much grief that the desire to hang on any part of them at all is so overwhelming. Their clothes, their favourite mug, a much loved picture of a wedding day are all there to cherish and hold onto for as long as it takes, but could you restore their voice, their physical mental being and download it into a synthetic machine that knows everything about the person they have supplanted but not how to act with instinctive. Such is the haunting premise of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series and its opening episode of the new series Be Right Back.
To watch the mental anguish of Hayley Atwell’s character deal with the loss of her husband was soul destroying, to watch her contemplate being tempted to talk to her husband from beyond the grave via digital phone software and then in the shape of super-heated malleable being was heart breaking. It asks the question, is anything better than life? Real life, the nuts and bolts and mechanics that anyone can download but not without that which gives a person meaning in the eyes of another, their history, their desires and their own personal thoughts.
Charlie Brooker’s script brings out the very best in Hayley Atwell, an actor who gone from strength to strength in recent years and who touches the essence of female vigour in her roles, and reduces her to the very basic individual, that of one who is desperately lonely and who just wants that one final goodbye. Alongside her was the excellent Damhnall Gleeson, a man who follows his father in his acting prowess and ability. The scene where she realises that just because the man is stood infront of her, doesn’t mean he is actually there was riveting and heart wrenching. In the end the only place for this made to order interloper in her life was in the attic, collecting dust and only allowed out when needed, a realisation that is where she should have kept the memory of her husband, locked up in her own thoughts and not let loose on the world.
A cracking story from a man who rivals Roald Dahl in the way he presents his tales.
Ian D. Hall