Making video games turns out to be a dangerous profession in the 1980s-set Bandersnatch, the first standalone feature film based on Charlie Brooker’s dystopian science-fiction Netflix series Black Mirror.
Bandersnatch’s first trailer came out on YouTube on Thursday, a day before the film’s December 28 release on the streaming platform. The trailer introduces Stefan (Fionn Whitehead), a computer programmer tasked with adapting the fantasy novel Bandersnatch into a video game. As he gets increasingly involved with the project, Stefan starts to have strange dreams, which soon fuse into his reality. “Your fate has been dictated,” a woman says in a television screen. “You’re not in control.”
David Slade, who had directed Black Mirror’s Metalhead episode (season four) has reportedly helmed Bandersnatch, but Netflix has not yet confirmed this. The supporting cast includes Craig Parkinson, Alice Lowe and Asim Chaudhry.
The British anthology series, which takes a dark view of the impact of modern technology on society, was renewed for a fifth season this year. The season is expected to come out in 2019.
Bandersnatch was a fictional creature introduced by CS Lewis in his 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass, a follow-up to his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The character has since been referenced several times in popular culture and was also the title of a short-lived video game released in United Kingdom in 1984. A Twitter user in November noted that the video game Bandersnatch was referenced in Black Mirror’s season three episode Playtest, which revolves around a terrifying video game system that blurs the lines between the real and the unreal.