In this nasty little thriller, Black Mirror finds its way into the blackest of human hearts as we follow a successful architect down the rabbit hole of her own amorality when a secret from her past threatens to ruin her carefully curated present. Andrea Riseborough is in the lead here and it is an absolutely ferocious performance she gives as a woman becoming ever more and more unhinged; past a certain point, Riseborough hones in on Mia as a woman fraying at every seam. I reckon some audience members will find her character a bit hard to buy as she just makes the wrong decision at nearly every turn of the story, but once she’s into it, Mia becomes a reactive character; all she’s doing is reacting to each and every moment as it comes and Riseborough withdraws farther and farther into herself like a cornered animal, which, of course, Mia is. Kiran Sonia Sawar is also fantastic as a peppermint sucking insurance investigator who finds herself on a collision course with Mia by pure chance. Sawar humanizes Shazia, but she also cuts an iconic figure with her striking profile and her casual hijab, her techy earpiece and her peppermints. The tension mounts as you watch these two characters slowly moving toward each other; the episode takes the time to make it very slow indeed and it really works. Hillcoat also does some incredibly great visual work; the episode was filmed in Iceland and Hillcoat creates stunning shots and a grim score, including music by Atticus Ross, adds to the darkness. The episode has a twist right at the end that isn’t there for anything other than pure mean-spiritedness and it’s Black Mirror at its finest. And that isn’t even the REAL twist which was a reveal that literally made me clutch my head and scream out loud. With Crocodile, Black Mirror bounces back from Arkangel with a dark, freezing sucker punch right to the gut. Bravo. 4 stars.
tl;dr – pitch-black, mean & nasty, this crime thriller boasts two brilliant lead performances, visually stunning imagery and an ending of undeniable power. 4 stars.