Black Mirror: White Christmas, review: 'Be careful what you wish for...'

However wretchedly Christmas goes for any of us this year, we’re unlikely to experience anything quite as nightmarish as the characters in the starry, festive Black Mirror did. Even the residents of Albert Square will have it good by comparison.

Following on from Charlie Brooker’s two Channel 4 series of cautionary tales about our obsession with digital technology, this impeccably produced, slickly performed one-off was based on three precepts. What if an implant could let you literally see through other people’s eyes? What if this technology also allowed you completely to “block” someone in the real world (much as one already can on social media), so that you would just be a pixelated blur to each other? And what if a different kind of implant, a “cookie”, could copy every aspect of your personality and then be removed for other purposes?

Unfolding largely in flashback, and like a smartphone-era version of Sartre’s claustrophobic classic Huis Clos – by way of The Twilight Zone, the Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Source Code and the short stories of Roald Dahl and Philip K Dick – it began very low-fi indeed. A sad-sack Rafe Spall woke up, dazed, in a snowbound cottage, with Wizzard on the radio and Jon Hamm (Mad Men’s Don Draper) breezily preparing Christmas lunch. What on earth was going on?

Hamm explained that he used to have a hobby helping men attract women, counselling them in real time, thanks to a so-called Eye-Link that put him in direct contact with the men and behind their peepers. Yet one of his clients, upon meeting a glamorous but severely disturbed girl (Natalia Tena) at an office party, had unwittingly persuaded her to kill both him and herself – to silence the chatter in their heads. We saw the fellow vainly insisting that the voice in his bonce was real. “No one understands what that’s like!” she smiled, as her fatally spiked drinks claimed them both.

Where this delicious black comedy had shades of Dahl’s tale of a kindly poisoner The Landlady, Hamm’s account of his previous actual job called to mind another Dahl novella, the living-brain-in-a-jar tale William and Mary. Here we saw Oona Chaplin’s porcelain-skinned spoilt brat make a cookie of herself in order to run her digitally controlled house. Trouble was, the copy was completely sentient, condemned to a Sisyphean hell of being forever trapped in the dwelling’s circuitry with nothing to do but draw blinds and make toast. You’ll never again take your phone’s “intelligent personal assistant” (Siri, Cortana and suchlike) for granted.

Darkest of all, however, was the real reason Spall and Hamm were there. It turned out that the former’s girlfriend, falling pregnant, had permanently blocked him and vanished. Why? Because, as he eventually learnt, in an appallingly tense scene, the baby wasn’t his. Having killed the grandfather and left the tot to freeze, he had been found by police, unwilling to talk.

If you thought there was something fishy about Hamm’s and Spall’s confines, you were right. This was in fact an artificial construct much like Chaplin’s, with Hamm digitally sent in by police to tease a confession out of Spall’s cookie.

Hamm’s punishment for his previous, illicit hobby was to be universally blocked, reducing the rest of humanity to indistinct, inaudible pixels. But, as the real Spall languished in jail, his cookie had a yet worse deal, incarcerated for millennia in the digital snow-globe in which it had been all along, with I Wish it Could Be Christmas Everyday playing on a never-ending loop – a clear case of be careful what you wish for.

Although one half-guessed Spall’s predicament, and tired slightly of his character’s moroseness, this was thrilling stuff: escapist entertainment with a very real-world sting in its tail. Like the stronger of the previous Black Mirrors, it exaggerated present-day technology and obsessions to subtle but infernal effect, a nightmare-before-Christmas reminder that to revere our digital gizmos is to become their pathetic slave. Mince pies, anyone?