Crocodile ★★★½
‘Crocodile’ is a brilliant fusion of style and genre, blending a dark Fargo-esque tale of crime with the quietly intense bleakness of Michael Haneke. Mia Nolan (Andrea Riseborough) has done something terrible. Fifteen years ago, she and her boyfriend Rob (Andrew Gower) accidentally hit a biker while driving inebriated. Rather than report the incident to the police, the two throw the corpse into a nearby lake and try to forget the whole incident. Back in the present, a sober Rob visits Mia in a hotel and says he wishes to reach out to the man’s surviving wife. Panicking, Mia kills Rob and tries to cover up her crime.
The technological angle of the story comes through in the shape of a new device allowing the replaying of subjective memories. Insurance agent Shazia (Kiran Sonia Sawar) is investigating a minor traffic accident that occurred just outside the hotel where Mia murdered Rob. Discovering through use of the device on other witnesses that Mia saw the accident, Shazia crosses paths with her to the terrible detriment of both.
Filmed in the cold landscape of Iceland, ‘Crocodile’ has a harsh and distant bleakness to its setting and cinematography that complements its violent narrative well. Like Fargo (both the film and series), the episode uses the snowy and uninviting terrain of its setting as an atmospheric parallel for the senseless brutality of its narrative. Unlike Fargo though, most of the episode’s violence takes place entirely off camera, leaving the viewer’s imagination to fill in the grisly details.
Stylistically and tonally, ‘Crocodile’ is much more Haneke than Coen, and there’s no humor to be found in its brutality. Like Caché and Funny Games, the consequences of violence are very much a paramount focus of the episode. Mia and Rob thought they could cover up a drunken mistake, but the overwhelming guilt and resulting cover-ups only lead to further killing.
The acting in ‘Crocodile’ is subtle, but stunningly real. The way Mia is almost constantly teary-eyed (“crocodile tears”) contrasted with Shazia’s hauntingly real weeping for mercy later give the episode a classic Black Mirror gut-wrench.
There’s one criticism I have with the episode, and it lies in the ending. After Mia commits her final murder of Shazia’s baby, it’s revealed in a plot twist that he was blind, and therefore had no way of recalling his memories to the police. The murder of a baby is a depth so dark and unimaginable that most shows wouldn’t even dare attempt it. To me, that last ironic twist of the knife felt incredibly contrived and manipulative by the script. Besides that, the episode was refreshingly unique for the show, and I appreciated the new way it placed its technological commentary on the backburner as a way to advance the plot.
Teleccentric 