To assist with a funeral commemoration, a lonely man is asked to engage with a  groundbreaking system that allows users to literally step inside old photographs.

There’s a clear pattern emerging in Charlie Brooker’s excellent seventh season of Black Mirror. High-concept dystopian ‘punchline’ sci-fi alternates with more nuanced emotional storytelling, albeit framed by the possibilities of future tech.

After the wham-bam AI nihilism of Plaything, Brooker has teamed up with writer Ella Road to take the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and flip it on its head. In Michel Gondry’s 2004 movie, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet employ neural tech to erase each other from their memories. In Eulogy, Phillip (in an A-list performance by the brilliant Paul Giamatti) learns of the death of an old flame from his youth, a lover from nearly forty years before. He is approached to provide memories of Carol through a neural interface, except, such was his heartbreak, he has spent the last four decades purposefully erasing her from his own memories. The tech can help, however, using the stimulus of old photographs. The problem is, Phillip has already employed the decidedly lo-tech but effective technology of scissors and marker pens to excise any visual trace of Carol from his boxes of old snaps. All is not lost, as the AI invites him physically to enter the pictures to look for clues.

What follows is less dystopian science fiction than a genuinely touching tale of lost love, ultimately hinging on a plot device worthy of the best of 19th century romantic fiction… more specifically Tess of the D’Urbervilles to which it owes a very specific debt.

Verdict: Whether Eulogy would carry in its own right without Giamatti’s performance is a moot point, but it’s this performance that is worth the Netflix subscription alone. ‘Tender’ and ‘Black’ and ‘Mirror’ weren’t three words I was expecting to put in the same sentence, but there you are. I’ve just done it. 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com