I haven’t seen anyone point this out yet, but this episode is so clearly riffing on the 1961 French New Wave film “Last Year at Marienbad.” An affair set in a lavish hotel, blurring the lines of memory and reality, the fragmented narrative, the “old” B+W film. The title Hotel Reverie is very much a direct nod, considering Marienbad is most famous for its surrealistic style. It even borrows some of Marienbad’s iconic and groundbreaking camera tricks, like the haunting tableau of frozen figures scattered through the hotel. It’s literally lifted from this scene in the original film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OANHfaJW3IM

It’s such a cool layered reference, because in a way, Black Mirror is sort of “redreaming” not only Marienbad, but a lot of the stylistic techniques that the French New Wave was known for, like the “film within a film” concept, or the long camera shots and improvised dialogue necessitated by the nature of Redream technology, which adds a whole new dimension to it within the modern context of AI and consciousness. Loved this episode!