School is out, and so is French! The annual British celebration of unlearning any foreign languages learned in school may now commence. “I’d like a vodka,” says one monoglot schoolgirl as she prepares for a summer of partying with her friends in Bolton. Think it through, young lady. When conjugating the conditional, you do not employ an auxiliary verb. Someone is going to be disappointed when the GCSE results are out later this month.
Rochelle, our protagonist, is the same. “That final question?” she says, referring to the exam paper. “I copied all the French from the back of that,” she adds as she waves her mineral water bottle. What a letdown for an examiner who had hoped for a run-through of the story of Camus’ L’Étranger only to be met with the ingredients for Volvic.
But Rochelle’s issues are more serious than her impending French failure. Her phone is possessed. Unfortunately, this isn’t included in Giffgaff’s 100Gbps data bundle, but it’s something – where are caps locked? – SINISTER TIME. An app called Red Rose is infecting the phones of Bolton school leavers, as though it is determined to transform their life into a task-focused video game. Which, if you read the newest virtuality philosophy, is very much where we are going.
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This is the basis of Red Rose, an amusing and unsettling film (BBC Three). Regardless, it’s a lot like the premise of Black Mirror’s 2016 episode Shut up and Dance, in which a teenage boy downloads what he thinks is an anti-malware program called Shrive, which films him masturbating to pornography and then threatens to make the footage go viral unless he performs increasingly heinous tasks, up to and including murder.
Rochelle has a similar experience. An offer to download the app appears on her device, and she clicks download like a mug. Red Rose will soon make forceful demands. Unless she kisses Noah at a house party, a video of her queuing for cereal at a food bank will be shown on TVs throughout the house.
Rochelle is afraid of kissing Noah since Noah’s girlfriend, Wren would freak out. Nonetheless, she does it – and she does it well. (It never occurs to Rochelle, Wren, or the playwright that someone who would ridicule a friend for utilizing a food bank is no friend at all, but nevertheless.)
Another issue is the party soundtrack. Who turned the clock back to the 1990s? Is Faithless Sleeping? Snap! Rhythm Is a Dancer!? Aqua’s Barbie Princess? If this is what the youngsters are up to this summer, they have larger issues than poor grades.
But what makes Red Rose more sinister than anything that escaped Charlie Brooker’s PC six years ago is that the program is both Jekyll and Hyde. When Rochelle’s electricity goes out and she doesn’t have any money to pay for the meter, she discovers it has been credited with £100. When she’s worried about not having something to wear to the party, she wakes up one morning to discover a glittery dress hanging on the line. We don’t know what Red Rose is yet, but it’s not implausible that it’s the ghost of Rishi Sunak from the future, alleviating the cost of the living tissue by random acts of ill-conceived taxpayer-funded generosity.
However, the Sunak theory seems implausible. After all, we witnessed a girl being tortured in a Manchester flat the previous Christmas before the opening titles. No matter how many times she yells, “Alexa, turn off everything!” her phone, TV, and air conditioner continue to malfunction. All of her equipment is commanded by an incomprehensible evil force that pushes her to do something disastrous. In my opinion, Red Rose is more like Liz Truss than Sunak.
Wren and Rochelle’s bond is later tested when Red Rose transforms their innocent texts into nasty ones. When Rochelle takes up her phone, she finds the video of her deceased mother. “She misses you, too,” Red Rose replies. Does she, however? In this brilliant first episode, Red Rose sends Rochelle a message about two twins she should be watching while she attends this horrible party. The two daughters emerge on her phone, plaintively asking where she is. “Don’t worry, I’ll watch after them,” a man appears behind them. The woman is Rochelle’s mother, and she resembles a Walking Dead zombie. Clearly, this portends nothing positive.
The creators, Michael and Paul Clarkson, have previously made horror hokum (The Haunting of Bly Manor), but this time they create something more intriguing. The two characters, Rochelle (Isis Hainsworth) and Wren (Amelia Clarkson) are already up to their necks in believable adolescent angst, with poverty, childcare, shattered families, and our old pal wastrel fathers.
What does Red Rose desire, and why is it taking over these schoolgirls’ lives? We’ll find out in the next episodes. And, if it’s a success, there will be a Yorkshire-set sequel named White Rose; just wait and see. My assumption is that Red Rose is not just a metaphor for late capitalism’s virus, but also an inadvertent remark on the sinister powers underpinning the Tory leadership contest.
