Created by Bryan Elsley
Kiss Me First
Based on Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach
Written by Bryan Elsley
Directed by Misha Manson-Smith
Starring Tallulah Haddon, Simona Brown, Matthew Beard, George Jovanovic, Freddie Stewart, Misha Butler, Haruka Abe, Samuel Bottomley
Country of origin United Kingdom, Channel 4/Netflix
Kiss Me First may just win the award for 2019 for “most misleading series title”. It sounds like a fluffy little rom-com, doesn’t it? I didn’t give it a second glance until a friend mentioned it to me and said it was a pretty good cyber-crime thriller.
Which, it turns out, it is. There is this teenage girl named Leila. She lived a rather sheltered life with her mother up until she was 17, when her mother died. She kept the house, a seedy little dump in the industrial East End, her mum’s furnishings, and a modest monthly stipend that could pay the bills or pay for her fanatic devotion to a world-wide multi-player virtual-reality game called Azana, but not both. So she gets a job, which enables her to keep on playing. By so doing, she stumbles across a corner of the game called Red Pill. Leila (online nym Shadowfax) meets some other peers in this reclusive corner, other teens, Adrian, the leader of the group who kicks her out on the pretext that she doesn’t have access, and Mania (Simona Brown) whom she befriends.
She meets up with Mania (RL name Tess) and they end up partying and then going back to Tess’s flat to sleep. Leila wakes up, and seeing that Tess is sound asleep, proceeds to log on under Tess’ Mania account. There, she sees Adrian persuading a third player to jump off a cliff. What she doesn’t realize at the time is that the real-life person playing the jumper is poised on a balcony six storeys up, and when the avatar jumps, so does he. Adrian has convinced the teen to commit suicide.
It turns out that the group are all teens, all with dark secrets and hidden fears, that Adrian exploits for his own purposes. When Tess vanished, Leila begins to investigate, despite having a dark secret and hidden fears of her own. And learns that Adrian actually wanted her in his little cult.
Cybergames in which the players get into trouble is nothing new, of course. There’s at least four separate anime series under the name of Sword Art Online that explore such situations very thoroughly. (The series vary in quality, from the original to the latest, Alicization, which are very good, to the two intermediaries, which were so-so).
However, the characters in Kiss Me First have more depth, and Haddon and Brown (Leila and Tess) are outstanding in their respective roles. The plot is complicated, the motives sophisticated, and it avoids the more formulaic elements of computer-game-eats-teens stories.
It will keep your attention and hold it well through the six episodes. The ending hints at a second season, but as yet there has been no announcement. The series has definitely attracted fan interest, though.
Now on Netflix.