Bandersnatch: Opening a New Door of Entertainment

By Gracie Denneen ‘21

Walking through the Stu during the past couple of months, you must have heard the word “Bandersnatch” at some point or another. This movie held the title of the first interactive adult movie introduced on Netflix, so naturally, I decided to watch it as soon as I possibly could.

I grabbed my computer, got some popcorn, and prepared myself for the movie of a lifetime. But the movie wasn’t quite what I expected. After talking about it with different people, I found that it didn’t live up to anybody’s expectations because of the lack of control given to the viewer and the confusing and unsatisfying plot.

Following in the footsteps of interactive children’s movies (such as Puss In Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale and Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile) Bandersnatch is the first interactive film for adults available on Netflix. Netflix came up with the idea of an interactive film aged at a more mature audience in early 2017, according to Variety.com, and asked Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones to coordinate with a Netflix team to create it. The idea didn’t seem feasible to the pair at first, but after discussing future Black Mirror episode ideas, they created the plot of Bandersnatch to work with the interactive film concept. Using Branch Manager, the Netflix Production Team’s branched-narratives script-writing tool, the group got to work.

The story follows a British teen in the 80s, Stefan, during his quest to create a make-your-own-decision video game based on the fictional book Bandersnatch. The movie puts the audience in Stefan’s shoes by giving viewers decisions ranging from which cereal Stefan should eat to whether or not he should commit murder. As is mirrored in the movie itself, insanity and meticulous planning riddled the creative team’s journey; the movie contains 28 potential decisions and 7 different endings.

Though the prospect of watching an interactive film excited audiences, the execution of the movie didn’t live up to its potential. The concept of multiple endings should intrigue viewers, but it only works if viewers feel like their choices truly dictate the outcome of the story. Many viewers felt that they didn’t have control over the narrative because the structure of the film caused viewers to “start over” in certain situations. Sometimes, after I made a choice, I would watch Stefan suffer the consequences of my decision and then be rerouted to the prior scene where I would be offered the same two choices as before. Essentially, I had made an “incorrect” decision, and the movie tried to prompt me to make the “correct” decision. These “soft endings,” as they’re called, according to a flow chart from the website Uproxx, frustrated viewers. When the movie rewinded to help viewers make a better decision, the viewers felt like the decisions they made were unimportant, prompting many to stop watching the movie altogether.

A similar problem arose with the seven potential endings of the movie. These numerous potential endings kept viewers from feeling satisfied when they finished the movie. The viewer had access to every single ending because once they reached a potential ending, the movie’s structure made it possible for them to view numerous endings by letting them make a different decision in a prior choice. While watching the movie, I felt almost overwhelmed by the seemingly endless number of outcomes of the story. I (along with countless others) got so accustomed to restarting after I had reached a potential outcome, that once I had watched every ending, I still felt like I hadn’t finished the movie. A basic narrative structure provides the viewer with a clear ending; the introduction, inciting incident, rising action, climax, and falling action set the viewer up for a satisfying conclusion to the story. The confusing and multilayered construction of Bandersnatch kept the movie from a satisfying resolution.

Bandersnatch introduced Netflix users to the art of interactive filmmaking. Though the interactive feature and the narrative structure of the movie made it frustrating and confusing to viewers, this movie opened up a whole new world of entertainment. I predict that film companies will master the use of decision-making based movie structures and create intriguing movies in the future with a perfect balance of possibility and satisfaction. Bandersnatch is one of the first of its kind, but certainly not the last.