Happy holidays to “
Black Mirror” fans: An upcoming film offshoot of the popular dystopian series is dropping extremely soon.
Netflix surprised viewers by releasing the trailer for “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” Wednesday night, teasing a movie about a young video game programmer in 1984 who “begins to question reality as he adapts a sprawling fantasy novel into a video game and soon faces a mind-mangling challenge.”
Now, the release date is known, and there won’t be much of a wait for it: Dec. 28, Deadline reports.
“Welcome back,” the trailer for the vintage-looking film teases.
The show, created by Charlie Brooker, has in the past released longer Christmas episodes. Netflix calls this one “A Black Mirror Event,” with the show’s fifth season coming out at a later, as-yet-unknown date.
“Bandersnatch” features Fionn Whitehead (“Dunkirk”) with Will Poulter (“The Maze Runner”) and Asim Chaudhry, and reportedly is directed by David Slade, who also directed the Season 4 “Black Mirror” episode “Metalhead.”
“I keep having these vivid dreams, like thinking weird things,” the young protagonist (Whitehead) says in the trailer, as he prepares to pop some red and yellow capsules. Then a Big Brother-like voice intones, “We’re gonna be a hit factory! Like Motown, but for computer games.” One of these games is titled “Bandersnatch — it’s an adventure game based on the book.”
BTW: A “Bandersnatch” is a fictional creature featured in Lewis Carroll’s 1872 novel “Through The Looking Glass.” It appeared in the poems “Jabberwocky” and “The Hunting Of The Snark.”