Black Mirror: Is ReDream a Real Moviemaking Tech? How Does It Work?

In the seventh season of Netflix’s ‘Black Mirror,’ the episode titled ‘Hotel Reverie’ presents a star-crossed romance between two Hollywood actresses. One is Dorothy Chambers from the 1940s, and the other is Brandy Friday from the current timeline. Dorothy dies decades before Brandy is born, but they cross paths with each other through a radical new technology called ReDream. It is brought into the picture to revive an old movie named ‘Hotel Reverie’ where Brandy is slated to play the lead role while the rest of the cast, including Dorothy, remain the same. SPOILERS AHEAD.

The Fictional ReDream Presents a New AI Moviemaking Option

While artificial intelligence has slowly become a part of the filmmaking process, and some movies have resurrected dead actors and gotten a performance out of them, the tech is yet to achieve the detail and depth that ReDream from ‘Black Mirror’ brings to the story. In real life, there is an app with the same name that works as a Dreamcast emulator, allowing its users to play Dreamcast games on any device. However, it has nothing to do with the technology that appears in this episode of the show. The idea of ReDream germinated in the mind of ‘Black Mirror’ creator Charlie Brooker when he thought about a premise where a person tries to rework an old horror movie footage.

He wanted to put the character into the reality of the said horror film and make an episode that focuses on the experiences of the character. However, over time, the horror movie turned into a 1940s romance thriller, but the core of it, which focuses on immersing in the reality of a movie, stuck with him. It was a way for characters from different eras to interact with each other and form a bond that transcends the scope of time. With the increased use of AI in filmmaking, Brooker wanted to explore that aspect through a unique lens. While he shared his thoughts on the use of tech and how it hampers human creativity, he saw ReDream as a much different aspect of tech, though not without its drawbacks.

ReDream Traps the Film’s Characters in a Virtual Reality

Filmmaking is a costly process. It requires meticulous production design, proper lighting, and direction, to name a few. It also requires all the actors on the screen to fall in sync and deliver their lines perfectly. On top of that, there is a time constraint, which makes it essential to get the movie done within a given timeframe to prevent the costs from going further. With ReDream, most of these things can be done away with, at least when it comes to making remakes. With the source material, it can code an entire film and its cast into existence, such that they are not self-aware actors but characters who actually believe their lives are real. So, in the original ‘Hotel Reverie,’ the actress Dorothy Chambers knew she was playing the role of Clara. But in ReDream’s version, she believes in herself as Clara and has accepted the reality that the film presents for her.

The same goes for the rest of the cast. This allows actors like Brandy Friday, who is replacing the lead actor in a gender swap, to slip into the role, say their lines, and leave. The only thing it requires of Brandy is to be incredibly precise with her lines because the rest of the cast will be precise with theirs. If she pulls it off, the entire movie can be finished in 90 minutes, which is the runtime of the original film. The same holds true for other films. A two-hour film can be made in real-time and finished in two hours, and so on. This constraint puts the movie in a different dimension where time flows differently. Each passing second in the real world equals an hour or so in the virtual world. So, in the hours that it takes for the ReDream team to fix the computer, months pass for Dorothy and Brandy, who are each other’s only companions.

The incredible thing about ReDream is that it presents a heavily realistic production design. So, everything that is present in a scene will be realistic, from the piano to the poison to the guns to the death of another character. In the same vein, whatever was out of the frame of the original film does not exist. So, if there is a character whose room never appears in the film, then it does not exist in the movie. If a door has never been opened in the film, the other side of it does not exist in ReDream’s version. Instead, it becomes the fringe. Because it is a virtual reality, it exists within the bigger universe of the digital world as a separate pocket universe. The film’s characters cannot leave this reality unless one of them becomes self-aware, which is what happens with Dorothy.

Dorothy Defies the Laws of ReDream’s Universe

In ReDream, all characters are bound by their arcs in the story and can only remember the backstories assigned to them. For most characters, this works. But things are a bit different for Dorothy. When she played Clara, she connected the character with her own life, imbuing it with her own emotions. Filming the movie was a turbulent time in her life as she fell in love with a woman who worked behind the scenes but could not express her love openly. She longed to be with the one she loved and was heartbroken by the fact that the world would never allow her to be who she truly was. The same feelings were true for Clara, who longed to leave a marriage where there was no love.

So, when Brandy calls her by her real name, not her character name, Clara, it clicks something in her programming. It leads to a glitch where the walls between Dorothy and Clara start to break down, and as a result, the virtual version of the actress starts to become self-aware. It is due to this that she is the only character who does not pause when the film is suddenly interrupted by coffee falling over the computer system. This is also why she is able to cross over into the fringe, where she finds out everything about her life as Dorothy and understands what happened to her in the real world. This self-awareness allows her to fall in love with Dorothy over the course of the next few months and change the storyline as she is no longer bound to the script.

Despite all this, she has no control over the program that has brought her into existence. This means that the people in the real world have all authority over her, and they can easily wipe her memories, making her forget something like falling in love with Brandy. It also does not allow her to come out of the virtual world, dooming her to an infinite existence in a world that never goes beyond 90 minutes. Notably, with each video that ReDream brings to life, a new virtual reality for the person inside it is created. This means that the Dorothy in ‘Hotel Reverie’ can die, but the Dorothy in an audition video can still live, though she will have no memory of what happened to her other version.