Binge-r #276: Severance + Why Are You Like This
Can’t Get You Out of My Head: Adam Scott (Mark) in Severance
SEVERANCE S1
Streaming Service: Apple TV+
Availability: All nine episodes now streaming
This wildly ambitious science-fiction workplace comedy is studded with cubicle menace, drily surreal textures, and a quietly profound meditation on existence and discovery. It’s also my favourite new show of the year to date. Those two points are undoubtedly connected – the ambitions of neophyte creator Dan Erickson brook no shortcuts, instead requiring the patience to engage with a mind-bending concept and deliriously straight dialogue. Severance is not just weird for the sake of it, it creates dual worlds and uses them to explore grief, longing and how the employee of tomorrow is the literal tool of today’s ambitious employers. It’s a fantastical literary sensibility crossed with a technology thriller, then punctuated with cult vibes and unsettling staff parties. I wish more shows took this many risks.
Detailing the narrative is counter-productive, as the slow drop reveal of the first few episodes immerses you in the character’s perspectives. In short, at one roughly present day American company staff members have agreed to have a chip inserted that divides their memories in two: outside the office they have no recollection of what they do at work, in the office they don’t have any memory of life outside their basement workplace. They are two people in a single mind and body – the one that’s lived a full life but no longer knows how they make a living, and the newcomer only aware when they check in each morning. The plot is odd, then disturbing. The ‘innies’ are akin to children, without a sense of the outside world, no knowledge of society’s limits, and no means of communication with the outside world or their ‘outie’ self.
The fulcrum is Mark (Adam Scott), who is seen both at the office, where he diligently works alongside Irv (John Turturro), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and unsettled newcomer Helly (Britt Lower), and a hollow home life marked by loss. Whether in Parks and Recreation or Big Little Lies, Scott excels at playing the everyman with frustrated twists. His Mark is a study in conjoined deprivation, trying to make sense of his severed totality as he dodges an icy supervisor, Ms Cobel (Patricia Arquette, full of unknowable intent) and his own regrets. The nine episodes are a dislocating ride, but the latter episodes build a genuinely gripping momentum. What Severance never does is make sense of everything it reveals – the answers can be as mystifying as the questions, or even create deeper uncertainty. But with detailed direction, primarily from Ben Stiller, it pulls off a transformative arc. The show doesn’t just take those risks, it makes sure they pay off.
Urban Sprawl: Naomi Higgins (Penny) and Wil King (Austin) in Why Are You Like This
WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS S1 (Netflix, all six episodes now streaming): Chances are you didn’t notice – or even know about – this seditious Australian Gen Z comedy when it aired a year ago on ABC Plus. Now that the rights have passed to Netflix you can take the time to experience its steady escalation, as the unfiltered gags and language are slowly joined by a knotty exploration of political representation and personal responsibility (but still with a Jon Benet Ramsey-themed drag act and a fisting mishap). 20something friends Penny (Naomi Higgins), Mia (Olivia Junkeer), and Austin (Wil King) shares houses and self-doubts, short cuts and expedient excuses, so that the assertion of identity and the primacy of personal politics are both cudgels they bear and chaos they have to navigate; every time one of them acts with conviction, the outcome is now what they expect. It’s a knowing comedy about a group keen to prove that it knows everything, with enough laughs whatever your generation.
>> Further Reading: Now that the season has concluded, it’s clear that The Book of Boba Fett was a mess. For The Age/SMH I wrote about how the Star Wars series went so wrong.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015, 118 minutes) is dense with Gothic atmosphere and a cast headlined by Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, and Mia Wasikowska, but the moody thriller lacks for sexual expression; Directed with gleaming relish by Brian De Palma, Scarface (1983, 169 minutes) is a crime epic told with excess and hunger as Al Pacino’s Cuban refugee rises to the top with Michelle Pfeiffer’s trophy wife.
New on SBS on Demand: The prolific South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo is one of the key directors of world cinema and The Woman Who Ran (2020, 75 minutes) is a suitably nuanced introduction to his conversational and cumulative aesthetic, with Kim Min-hee (The Handmaiden) playing a wife who in visits to three friends begins to consider the life that she has – and perhaps hasn’t – accepted for herself.
New on Stan: Performing inside a giant papier-mache head, Michael Fassbender was a revelation in Frank (2014, 96 minutes), playing an eccentric underground musician with Domhnall Gleeson and Maggie Gyllenhaal as bandmates; Big Game (2014, 91 minutes) is an amusingly daft action movie with Samuel L Jackson as a U.S. President who joins forces with a Finnish teen to survive when Air Force One is shot down over the northern wilderness.
>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to read about Netflix’s multi-layered grifter drama Inventing Anna and Amazon’s big muscled crime mystery Reacher.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 365 series reviewed here, 163 movies reviewed here, and 44 lists compiled here.
