
Rose puzzle review full#
My guess is that Red Rose may not just be a metaphor for the malware that is late capitalism, but also unwitting commentary on the diabolical forces behind the Tory leadership race.Did you know in the original version of The Little Mermaid, when the central character gets her legs, every step she takes feels as though she is walking on knives? And instead of marrying the prince at the end, she dies and turns into seafoam? Classic children’s fairy tales are full of a kind of morbidity that would have no place in today’s helicopter parent society. And, if it is a hit, there will be a Yorkshire-set sequel called White Rose just see if there isn’t. What does Red Rose want and why is it taking over the lives of these schoolgirls? We will find out in the next few episodes. The two leads, Rochelle (Isis Hainsworth) and Wren (Amelia Clarkson), are up to their necks in plausible teenage vexation, already featuring poverty, childcare, broken homes and our old friend wastrel dads. The creators, Michael and Paul Clarkson, have previous with horror hokum (they produced The Haunting of Bly Manor), but here they make something more engaging. A figure looms behind them, saying: “Don’t worry, I’ll look after them.” The woman is Rochelle’s mother, looking like a zombie straight from The Walking Dead. On her phone, the two girls appear, plaintively wondering where she is. But does she? The last message from Red Rose to Rochelle in this bravura opening episode is of two twins she should be babysitting when she is attending this grotesque party. Rochelle picks up her phone and sees footage of her dead mother. Later, Wren and Rochelle’s friendship is put under further stress when Red Rose changes their innocuous texts into abusive ones. Such is Red Rose, which is more Liz Truss than Sunak in my book.


All her devices are controlled by some scarcely comprehensible malignant force that drives her to do something fatal.
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No matter how many times she shouts: “Alexa, turn everything off!” her phone, TV and air conditioning continue to go rogue. After all, before the opening credits, we saw a girl the previous Christmas being tormented in a flat in Manchester. We don’t know what Red Rose is yet, but it is not impossible that it is the ghost of future Rishi Sunak, easing the cost of living crisis with random acts of ill-conceived taxpayer-funded largesse.īut the Sunak hypothesis is far-fetched. And when she worries she has nothing to wear for the party, she wakes up one morning to find a sparkly dress on the washing line. When Rochelle’s power cuts out and she hasn’t got any money for the meter, she suddenly finds it has been credited with £100. Who rewound us back to the 90s? Faithless’s Insomnia? Rhythm Is a Dancer by Snap!? Aqua’s Barbie Girl? If this is what the kids are getting down to this summer, they have bigger problems than bad grades.īut what makes Red Rose more insidious than anything that spooled from Charlie Brooker’s laptop six years ago is that the app is Jekyll as much as Hyde. There is another problem: the party soundtrack. (It doesn’t seem to occur to Rochelle, Wren or the scriptwriter that anyone who would tease a mate for using a food bank is no mate at all, but still.) Rochelle doesn’t want to kiss Noah, because her mate Wren, Noah’s girlfriend, will go postal. Unless she kisses Noah at a house party, footage of her queueing for cereal at a food bank will appear on TV screens around the house. Red Rose is soon issuing imperious demands.
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An invitation to download the app pops up on her screen and, like a mug, she presses download. No matter that it is very similar to 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 that films him masturbating to pornography and then threatens to make the footage go viral unless he performs increasingly horrible tasks, up to and including murder.

This is the premise for the entertaining and disturbing Red Rose ( BBC Three). Which, if you read the latest philosophy of virtuality, is pretty much where we are heading. An app called Red Rose is corrupting Bolton school leavers’ phones, as if it were bent on turning their lives into a task-fixated video game. Sadly, this isn’t part of the 100Gbps data bundle from Giffgaff, but something – where is caps lock? – MORE SINISTER.

But Rochelle has got bigger problems than her looming French fail.
