Starring: Mamoudou Athie, Phylicia Rashad, Amanda Christine

Written & Directed by Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr

After losing his wife and memory in a car accident, a single father undergoes an agonizing experimental treatment that causes him to question who he really is.

One of the more recent additions to the sci-fi/horror canon is the ‘consciousness transfer’ movie, predicated on the idea that the contents of our brains can be stored digitally with a whole variety of usually not-so-hilarious consequences. Actually, a quick Google tells me they first emerged in 1962 with The Creation of the Humanoids (no, me neither) but as the real world is taken over by digitisation there has been a spate of them in recent years, think Replicas, Transcendence and CHAPPiE to name but three. On TV the idea has become a commonplace popping up recently in Picard, Westworld and more reassuringly in the Black Mirror episode San Junipero.

Thus it was, I approached Black Box (streaming on Amazon Prime) with some wariness. What else is there to say? Well, perhaps not a lot, but then like all the best stories, it’s about the way you tell it.

Mamoudou Athie stars as Nolan, a single parent struggling with amnesia after a car accident. His daughter, Ava (impressively portrayed by child actor Amanda Christine – remember that name we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this young actor), is effectively his carer but if Nolan can’t get his act together, child services are going to be called in. So off he pops to the B-Movie fall-back – a dodgy doctor offering a radical new treatment (Phylicia Rashad) involving an upmarket dentist’s chair, a bit of shiny white VR tech and stacks of ominously blinking computer servers. For some reason the hospital that Dodgy Dr Brooks works from hasn’t twigged that she’s up to no good, but perhaps such mundane details aren’t what this movie is about. I was happy to invest in some industrial grade rubber and suspend my disbelief from a giant credibility bungee.

Anyway, Nolan’s dodgy doc tells him he can unlock his lost memories by doing a ‘thing’ with the ‘thing’… only for him to discover that there’s stuff lurking in his brain that just ain’t right. Indeed, some of it is satisfyingly creepy. So far, so predictable, but there are one or two nice twists, and actually what drives this film is the playing of it. There’s a captivating chemistry between Athie and Christine as father and daughter – and the slightly lame sci-fi hokum is really there to act as a gateway to a rather affecting story about abuse, guilt and redemption.

Verdict: For sure, in many ways this is a lost (and slightly over extended) episode of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, but as streamed B movies go, this one was good company and is produced with real commitment by everyone involved. It’s definitely worth a looksee, and I have a feeling that there is good work to come from writer/director Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr. 7/10

Martin Jameson