We don’t envy Black Mirror‘s Charlie Brooker, a man whose job can, on some level, be boiled down to “trying to out-dystopia our current dystopia on basically a yearly basis.” It feels like every season of the Netflix techno-horror anthology series has had a scarier reality it has to out-do, and maybe that’s why the new trailer for the show’s seventh season—its first new episodes since June of 2023—seem so deliberately unsettling and creepy. (Or, hey: Maybe it’s just all those close-ups of a leering Peter Capaldi with a serial killer haircut.)
As is usually the case when trying to parse Black Mirror in two-second fragments, it’s not exactly easy to pick out which sequences in the trailer are meant to be viewed as part of a whole. (Excepting those shots of Jimmi Simpson and Cristin Milioti that are clearly from the “U.S.S. Callister” sequel episode we already knew was coming.) We do see several of the season’s bigger names, including Issa Rae, Paul Giamatti, and Rashida Jones, put on some sort of little device that seems to send your brain into a computer dreamscape, but there’s no way of knowing if that’s a recurring element, or just a particularly talent-loaded episode. Elsewhere, there are plenty of other odd touches: A.I. characters who seemingly become sentient; multiplying rabbit creatures that look sourced from an old Facebook game but which get a lot of very creepy attention; people chugging milk like there’s no tomorrow. We’ll be able to get a better sense of what at least some of this stuff is about when the seventh season actually arrives on Netflix on April 10; for now, we’re just going to pour over this thing again, trying to make sense of as many of these bizarre, lactose-heavy images as we can.
