Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Black Ops’ on Hulu, Where Stairs Lead To Scares, Shootouts, and Time Loop Freakouts 

A military strike team gets more than it bargained for in Black Ops (Hulu), an ambitious stew of war action, time travel, psychological horror, and, of course, stair climbing from independent writer-director Tom Paton.

BLACK OPS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In an unnamed war zone in Eastern Europe, a group of soldiers attack and subdue an enemy encampment. Though they gain the intel they were after, they also discover something unexpected: a civilian woman, bloodied and in chains. Unwilling to leave any loose ends, hard-ass squad leader Stanton (Shayne Ward, Coronation Street) orders Clarke (Samantha Schnitzler) to shoot the prisoner, which, under duress, she does, but not before the woman delivers a cryptic warning: “Don’t go down.” The team is taking fire and they exfiltrate, but the episode with the mysterious prisoner makes it a rough ride back to headquarters for debrief.

With the elevator out of commission at HQ, the team takes the stairs, and that’s when Black Ops gets into its groove. After climbing untold flights in the faceless cement stairwell, they finally reach an exit, but somehow it leads right back to the site of the firefight in Eastern Europe. Stanton and Clarke watch from a bluff as their earlier selves argue about the woman and eventually shoot her; when they turn back toward the stairwell, it’s accessible through a kind of portal. Clinging to protocol as a means of making sense, Stanton insists that the stairwell is some kind of training module, but the rest of the team has other ideas. “I always said I’d follow you to Hell,” one soldier says. “I just never thought you’d actually take me there.” She turns on her heel, descends a few flights in search of escape, and is promptly eaten by the mystery woman from operation, now covered in even more blood.

As the team continues to climb the stairs, it dawns on them that their past is part of this hellish present. So begins a series of revists to the original field of battle, each time with the intention of somehow preventing the shooting. Time travel is discussed. Back to the Future II is referenced. Nothing seems to work, and the team ends up engaging their other selves in futile shootouts, trying anything to agitate their way out of the reverse stairway to heaven.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? What begins as a standard warfighting scenario is turned on its ear quickly enough, so that this material would function well as a standalone episode of Black Mirror or, similarly, The Twilight Zone. In its sense of time’s arrow turned back on itself, Black Ops shares the sensibilities of the fantastic, mind warping 2014 Doug Liman/Tom Cruise thrill ride Edge of Tomorrow. And in its addition of a mysterious, malevolent entity who pulls the strings and systematically knocks off cast members, the psychological horror tropes of The Grudge and Ring are alive and well. Films traveling on a similarly trippy road as Black Ops, though they explore wildly different tangents, include the underrated 2018 Alex Garland joint Annihilation, and A Field in England, Ben Wheatley’s bizarro, brain-sodden drug romp from 2013.

Performance Worth Watching: As Clarke, the ops team’s emotional leader, if not its de facto one, Samantha Schnitzler is a bundle of empathy, resourcefulness, and — when the moment calls for it — total asskickery. Schnitzler will next appear in Intergalactic, a buzzed-about Sky UK drama about a band of convicts in a future world who escape from a women’s prison and light out into the galaxy.

Memorable Dialogue: “Maybe if you do the right thing, none of this shit will even happen.” The team spends a lot of time in the stairwell conjecturing about their predicament, and how they might use the sudden advent of time travel in their lives to exert their will on a FUBAR situation.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Call: Black Ops writer and director Tom Paton made some waves in the genre horror scene with his 2018 feature Black Site, which included many of the cast members from this film. Paton has managed to build a solid reputation, and quality performances from his cast, coupled with a white-knuckled grip on Black Ops‘ sometimes gonzo mix of genres, give it the juice to overtake its limited budget and periodic stretches of screenplay quicksand. (The team too often ask each other “What the fuck?!” repeatedly. The “fuck” is that you are stuck in a time loop purgatory that has manifested as a stairwell, and there is also an entity picking you off one by one. Let’s move on from the exasperated cussing.) Spending half of your film in a nondescript stairwell and another half repeating footage from the first half is also a means to stretch the budget, of course. But Schnitzler, fellow Paton regular Bentley Kalu (who was also a bit player in Edge of Tomorrow? Talk about time’s arrow turned back on itself!), and ex-Game of Thrones player Toby Osmond are invested in the film’s concept and direction, and manage to keep it mostly on the straight and narrow.

Ultimately, Black Ops is the sort of film that works best as a discovery on late night cable, the kind of thing that used to be a pleasant surprise when Comcast still included the Fearnet horror movie channel. You can blow holes in some of it, but keep coming back to wonder whether the team will really fight their way out of time’s reversal. By the time Kalu’s Garrett casually mentions “fighting the other us’s” as a means of escape, and the rest of the ops team nod, you find yourself nodding along with them.

Our Take: STREAM IT. Black Ops throws a lot at the wall once it gets moving, and not all of it sticks. But it goes hard on its crazier conceits, and the cast is game to carry it off. In the end it’s an enjoyable genre detour.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Black Ops on Hulu