Marc Scout (Adam Scott) has found the super hack: work and private life have to be linked, otherwise there will be no rebellion.
Photo: Apple TV+
When Marc Scout (Adam Scott) returns to his office after a break of several days, weeks or months (he doesn’t know exactly how long he was away), he doesn’t remember anything that happened to him before .
In the Apple TV+ series “Severance,” no employee knows what happens during their free time. In a spectacular move, Marc discovered that his late wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) might still be alive and being held somewhere in the basement of his employer Lumon Industries. But after a neurosurgical procedure that all participants in the titular “Severance” program have to undergo, the work consciousness of the employees of this company is strictly separated from their leisure consciousness.
The so-called “innie” knows nothing about what he does as an “outie” after his working hours. The office workers here are 100 percent dedicated to their work. They don’t know what their free-time self’s wishes, needs and fears are, and that doesn’t bother them while they’re working. »Severance«, an idiosyncratic mixture of science fiction, social drama and horror, stages the alienation, atomization and destruction of the individual through capitalist wage labor more consistently than any other filmic story.
The second season of “Severance” picks up exactly where season one ended with a tense cliffhanger and Marc Scout was able to combine his work and leisure consciousness through a hack. But this revolutionary moment of realization only lasted a short time, and so Marc Scout and his colleagues return to their wage labor amnesia. They continue to sit at desks in their vintage-style offices in the huge concrete block of the Lumon company, somewhere in an industrial area with a gigantic car parking lot, and let columns of numbers plop down small digital boxes on old-fashioned computer screens from the 70s.
This seemingly meaningless activity in a radically artificial environment is called macrodata refinement. The first season of this series, for which actor Ben Stiller is one of the directors, was praised by critics two years ago and literally showered with awards. The chamber play-like arthouse series also has its lengths in the second season and is not entirely easy fare.
»Severance« stages the alienation, atomization and destruction of the individual through capitalist wage labor more consistently than any other filmic narrative.
In season two, the employees suddenly find themselves in a snowy mountain landscape, where they go on a two-day workshop-like excursion without being asked or informed. From one moment to the next they find themselves in the middle of a gigantic area of ice and encounter a kind of demon like something out of a horror film, until their superior Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) reads to them in the evening around the campfire from the story of the company’s founder Kier Eagan, who looks like one religious figure of salvation is worshiped.
While season one strictly stuck to the stylish office world and repeatedly sent the characters through the long, narrow, white-lit hallways of Lumon Industries, the new season breaks this corset a little more. The employees continue to pursue their subversive strategies to undermine the order that restricts them. The employer Lumon cleverly takes up their resistance and incorporates it into his regulatory regime.
Marc and his colleague Helly (Britt Lower), who is actually part of the company’s management, but she doesn’t always know this, continue to get involved in their affair. And Irvin (John Turturro) is desperately searching for his lover, the retired Burt (Christopher Walken). The boundaries between work and leisure self are becoming more and more permeable. This picks up quite a bit over the course of the season and is of course heading for another escalation.
Available on Apple TV+