The second episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror Season Six, “Loch Henry” follows a young couple — Davis (Samuel Blenkin) and his girlfriend Pia (Myha’la Herrold) as they pursue a decades-old tale of terror. Davis is from a (now quiet) village in Scotland that used to be a popular place for tourists to visit, easily taken by the beauty of the area. Two such tourists, a young couple on their honeymoon, visited the spot when Davis was little, but soon went missing. They were found dead in the basement of Iain Adair, a local, unsuspecting man who had been capturing and torturing people for years.
Davis and Pia chose to investigate the killer Iain Adair, his torture room, and the town that turned into Sleepy-Hollow, alongside Davis’ friend Stuart (Daniel Portman), in the hopes of appealing to the mass interest in True Crime stories that has skyrocketed in recent years. They follow clues and leads from Stuart’s dad (John Hannah) and Davis’ mom (Monica Dolan), and they ultimately uncover more secrets than they bargained for. Black Mirror uses this dark interest to produce a meta-commentary on the exploitative relationship between the actual crime and its victims and the audience that craves gory details. It’s a dehumanizing process, true-crime media, and such a popular one that Black Mirror dedicated an entire episode to unpacking it.
So are the events of “Loch Henry” actually True Crime? No. It’s entirely made up. The town Davis hails from isn’t even real. The episode was filmed in Inveraray, a town in Argyll and Bute, which lies on the western shore of Loch Fyne. It’s not even inspired by any particular crime, to my knowledge.
This is the entire purpose of the episode. The fact that so many people are searching for the “truth” behind this false “True-Crime” mystery is the entire point the writers were making. Davis ends the episode absolutely drained of life by the people who turned his tragedy into content, a blatant commentary on the ethics of True-Crime content by the Black Mirror team. People are mainly only interested in consuming all the horrifying details, asking themselves how a person could ever do this, and then moving on immediately. True crime isn’t about justice for the victims or telling the “right” story, even if that’s how Pia sells the idea to Davis; it’s a murder mystery above all. Viewers, both in the Black Mirror universe and out in our real world, should grapple with what they watch here. It should push us to examine our interests in true crime if we have them, and the role of television in promoting it. Black Mirror masks the events in their usual air of sci-fi coverage, but “Loch Henry” is arguably the most realistic episode they’ve ever put out.
Though “Loch Henry” feels like an outlier to the majority of Black Mirror episodes regarding its minimal use of dystopian, sci-fi technological feats of terror, it’s still a biting commentary on the state of mankind. Perhaps its point is proved by the most-asked question about the episode being “Was it based on a true story?”