“Black Mirror’s” first feature film, Bandersnatch, is out now… accept or not?

Courtesy of Netflix

ABOVE: Fionn Whitehead in ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ (Inset: Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones)

Charlie Brooker’s latest Black Mirror offering is impossible to recap and won’t be able to be reviewed in the traditional sense: The stand-alone event — which is actually an interactive film — will play out differently for each viewer. And while that may sound like an idea for an episode of the Emmy-winning techno-paranoia series, Netflix has made it a reality for viewers.

On Friday, the streaming giant dropped its first live-action interactive experience with Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

Leading up to its Dec. 28 debut, Netflix released a trailer for Bandersnatch but hid the fact that the TV event — and first official Black Mirror stand-alone movie — is a choose your own adventure-style story that has been two years in the making.

Netflix has actually dabbled with this sort of choose-your-own-adventure formula within various children’s programs, operating largely under the radar. With “Black Mirror,” the technology gets a showy poster child, presenting what’s described as an “immersive entertainment experience …

where you control the story!

Watched the film, yet?

No?

Yes!

Well…

The plot is for a psychological thriller and isn’t all that complicated on the surface:

In this case, it’s a young man named Stefan (Fionn Whitehead), a is a young aspiring video game designer in 1984, whose dream is to adapt a massive Choose-Your-Own-Adventure paperback called “Bandersnatch” as a PC game video game. Stefan begins to wonder if someone is controlling or manipulating him, with the alternative being that — having lost his mother at any early age — he’s simply going mad.

But while Stefan’s journey goes down many different roads, one element remains constant: Designing games like this is really hard work.

So hard, in fact, that it could drive a person insane.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but the story is frankly secondary to the viewer’s ability to navigate toward various outcomes and multiple separate endings.

That’s accomplished by making choices along the way, with a black stripe appearing across the screen offering options as simple as what song Stefan plays to whether he opts to “Accept” or “Refuse” an offer.

The story weaves in the notion that the choices we make essentially create alternative realities, but the manner in which the narrative keeps circling back to the main through-line becomes numbing and repetitive the longer the experience drags on.

The logistics of “Bandersnatch” thus become the most intriguing aspect of it. With hours of footage were shot to accommodate the different possibilities, and the movie can run from 40-some-odd minutes to 90 or more depending on the paths taken.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

The illusion of control — on screen and in life — is the big issue underlying this deliciously, interactive experience.

And “Black Mirror” has always been obsessed with the potential of technology, and how humanity might find ways to abuse it. But “Bandersnatch” represents the first time it’s made a deliberate effort to advance the actual way in which stories are told.

Creator Charlie Brooker has once again pulled off a great visual treat, even at some points during the film to become a tad tedious. But, Culturedemandsgeeks will happily award an “A” for effort, but maybe a “B+” for the execution.

4/5 STARS