“Severance”: a disturbing thriller and sci-fi series produced and directed by Ben Stiller

There are different types of science fiction stories. There are adventures, fantasies, action and even comedy, but the splendor that the genre achieved in the last century had to do with the presentation of a dystopian future, claustrophobic and without individual freedom. Cinema was able to reflect that very well in the seventies, and precisely that cinema is the inspiration for one of the great series of this season: Severance, which premiered on Apple TV+.

In the future, a corporation called Lumon Industries has begun to use a procedure that allows its employees to separate their working life from their private lives in their brains, without either aspect of their life having memories of the other. A chip installed in the head achieves that effect that every employee does not take their problems from everyday life to work or that work issues appear in their minds when they leave the company every day. The method is as clean as it is disturbing, so from the first episode it is guessed that everything will start to turn into something dark.

The main character is Mark (Adam Scott) who at the beginning of the series must take the place of Petey, his best friend within the company, who has left his post. No one knows the true size of Lumon Industries. Employees climb an elevator where, without explanation, their memory of the afterlife is extinguished. After crossing labyrinthine corridors, you reach a huge office where there are only four employees. Everything is ascetic and minimalist, with white predominance. The four employees have their desks with computers and work with numbers whose meaning is completely unknown.

Along with Mark are Dylan (Zach Jerry), veteran Irving (John Turturro) and rookie Casey (Dichen Lachman). The series also follows Mark in his life away from the office, where he ignores everything that happens at work. They have friendly but at the same time strict supervisors who control that everything works, and as the episodes go on, more characters appear. At the end of each chapter there is a revelation that gives information about that world we know nothing about and in which everything seems to be marked by the total cleanliness that covers a monstrous truth.

Not only is the story right: even the sequence of titles is suggestive and distressing. The series plays in appearance with few elements but squeezes them to the maximum. He has, even in his darkness, a sense of humor that allows him to release some tension at the beginning, because as the plot progresses everything becomes more terrible.

No episode disappoints; the script is brilliant. But the script alone would not achieve by a long shot what the staging work achieves. Each frame is used to convey all the features of the series. Its producer, and director of several episodes, is none other than Ben Stiller, whose career as a director is already well proven, but here he demonstrates once again how complex and diverse his artistic universe is.

Severance is reminiscent of the science fiction of the seventies: it is built on the paranoia and mistrust of a society that had stopped believing in institutions. He owes a lot to literature — George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury — which was captured in films such as THX 1138, The Stepford Wives and even Woody Allen's comedy The Sleeper. At the same time, in her criticism of the world of work, she is a distant heir to Metropolis and Modern Times.

Severance manages to be the sum of many things and at the same time look original and novel at all times. It's one of the series of the year, no doubt.

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