Black Mirror season 6 evaluate: ‘Loch Henry’

Black Mirror is named a sequence concerning the risks of expertise, nevertheless it’s usually extra particularly concerning the corrupting affect of leisure. Spectatorship makes us merciless, the present suggests again and again, turning different people’ actual ache into fodder for our personal amusement. The sixth season episode “Loch Henry” suits into this dynamic however in a method that feels surprisingly anemic, neither exploring the potential ugliness of its premise nor growing characters who transcend it.

In the beginning of “Loch Henry,” Davis (Samuel Blenkin) is a movie scholar returning house together with his girlfriend Pia (Myha’la Herrold). It’s purported to be a quick stopover; they’re planning, to the bemusement of everybody however Davis, a documentary a few man who guards eggs from poachers. Then Pia discovers the nigh-deserted city was the house of a serial killer named Iain Adair. It’s a chance to make a movie folks will truly watch, maybe on the profitable video platform Streamberry, identified for its wealth of true crime reveals. And Adair’s crimes had been not directly uncovered by Davis’ father, an area police officer — so there’s a private angle to promote.

The factor is, even followers of true crime acknowledge it’s a morally fraught pastime. And “Loch Henry,” directed by Sam Miller and written by sequence creator Charlie Brooker, makes pretty gentle observations concerning the style’s ugly aspect. Davis is troubled by the prospect of exploiting his household’s trauma for content material, though his hometown good friend Stuart (Daniel Portman) — a bartender who cracks jokes about pronouns and “variety” — hopes it should revitalize the native economic system. A possible producer pushes the workforce into gathering new footage, nudging them towards the outer boundaries of moral documentary work. There’s a obtrusive hole between everybody’s pronouncements of sympathy and sensitivity and the photographs of lurid tabloid headlines. However then it seems that the thriller may not be as solved as everybody anticipated… and…

It’s not Netflix, trustworthy. It’s referred to as Streamberry. Picture: Netflix

Sadly, the reality isn’t all that compelling. Black Mirror is able to engendering actual horror and disgust — “White Bear,” for example, incorporates a twist that’s extra successfully terrible than Adair’s over-the-top crimes. However “Loch Henry” resists telling a great fictionalized crime story. Whereas the episode makes good use of grainy mockumentary clips for flashbacks, Adair’s murders are broadly sketched and generic thrill-kills which are neither critically horrifying nor performed nicely for darkish comedy. (One character compares the occasions to a nonexistent documentary referred to as The Waltonville Claw, however not less than that killer apparently ate the sufferer’s eyes in entrance of them, so he’s acquired what an business exec would possibly name a “hook.”) The trendy-day thriller, in the meantime, is launched late and rushed towards a conclusion that appears intentionally unsatisfying.

On the similar time, “Loch Henry” devotes extra time to the murders than to satirizing the media circus round them. A montage highlights the tonal dissonance between the grim subject material and Davis and Pia’s general lightheartedness, in addition to some jabs on the enterprise of discovering a “contemporary angle” on tragedy. We get a nod to the way in which streaming platforms quickly repackage each crime documentary right into a drama. However the city’s plight is much less fleshed out and surreal than many real-life comparability factors. (Final yr’s killings in Moscow, Idaho, resulted in a professor being falsely accused by a TikTok influencer who “solved” the murders utilizing tarot playing cards, which is a extra biting indictment of crime fandom than something in “Loch Henry.”) The episode is in the end about Davis’ personal familial drama, however he’s not a robust sufficient presence within the story to make that battle land.

The perfect a part of “Loch Henry” finally ends up being Davis’ relationship with Stuart and his good friend’s ailing father, a person who not solely remembers the murders, however might know extra about them than he lets on. Their scenes trace at a script that’s legitimately serious about its central topic: a village the place an older era of upstanding residents maintain one another’s sordid secrets and techniques, whereas a youthful one will do something to provide their city a future. However telling that story would require indulging the lowbrow voyeurism Black Mirror critiques — the outcomes would possibly even be match for Streamberry.