Death to 2020 (2020)

Death to 2020 arrives as a mockumentary retrospective, a format in which fictional talking heads narrate a year that needed no embellishment. Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones assemble a genuinely starry ensemble (Samuel L. Jackson, Hugh Grant, Lisa Kudrow, Tracey Ullman, Leslie Jones) and let each performer occupy a satirical archetype: the historian who confuses the Peloponnesian War with a reality show, the conservative spokesperson, the behavioral psychologist, the gig economy millennial. The casting is broad and multinational, which is its own quiet statement about who gets to be funny on a global streaming platform. The film does not linger on that statement. It moves on to the next joke.

The year under review supplies the material. George Floyd's murder, the protests that followed, the church photo op, and the toppling of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol all receive direct treatment, and the film does not soften them. Greta Thunberg's appearances at Davos and the Australian bushfires get their segment, as do the pandemic, the vaccine trials, and the American election. There is a mild swipe at a technology chief executive and at the gig economy, though the target is drawn gently enough to leave the arrangement intact. The tone stays observational. The film prefers to let the archive footage do the indicting.

Where the film declines to go is telling. There is no queer presence, no engagement with body image, no interest in neurodivergence, and no attempt to rewrite the historical record, only to recap it. Women appear frequently and Kamala Harris earns a mention, but the work has no feminist argument to make. The result is a brisk, well-cast catalog of a dreadful year, funny in bursts, rarely preachy, and ultimately content to describe the catastrophe instead of diagnosing it. A sommelier would call it a serviceable vintage, drunk too young.