Review of Severance

Note: This will cover both seasons

I barely remember coming across this series by accident by looking through some list, and what a pleasant surprise it was from its premise alone. Workers from a certain company get their brains surgically separated while at work, supposedly to let them work at ease and without the stress from outside, yeah, as if that doesn’t sound like a bad idea from the get go. Well, as we will find out later, the actual people that registered from outside in the first place have several reasons to work there, loneliness, depression after losing their partner, looking for someone, lack of better options or for propagandistic purposes, to promote the process as a good thing.

Although the script is good, what really surprised me was the directing, and even more so Ben Stiller being one of the directors. Although the setting is limited to the office and a house, the characters look like normal people in suits, and the CGI used in the series is not that good, the show manages to look good thanks to a polished production and well made backgrounds, alongside constant use of dynamic camera movements, cameras on rails to follow the characters yet not looking blurry at any moment, sometimes mirror angles, lots of closeups to highlight key details that either show off the good acting or make stand out elements that will be relevant to the plot at some point, fastly interchanged quick cuts to switch from the two people sharing the same body and their perspectives, to the point that the series appeared to be fantasy during the first episode, and so on. Even the weird goo-like CGI is excused when it is revealed to be the remnant memory of black paintings done by the character who was seemingly having hallucinations caused by stress and fatigue.

Since Severance is a mystery show, it needs to have a suspenseful soundtrack, and it sure does, sometimes the music can be quite haunting on top of stressful, and the sound effects are pretty immersive. The acting is one of the best things in the series, both for the creepy looking characters with their fake smiles or their dead looks in their eyes, and the cast that technically plays two different characters depending if they are inside or outside the company, managing two different personalities and sometimes even looks very well, with the highlights being the scenes when one of them changes to the other.

As you would expect from the premise, we see characters wanting to leave, desiring to find out about their lives outside, feeling confined in their workplace and without an actual life, as they clearly are, people from outside pointing out the dehumanizing aspect of the process, and even someone who could leave trying to connect with the main character to explain something to him, and suffering the constant switch ups in his head, both on a mental and a physical level, and even people falling in love with different people outside and inside the building, and the expected consequences when finding out than someone they like inside might already be married outside.

At the same time, the series is clearly a bit of a dark satire of corporativism and office work. People are isolated from everything outside, they barely know about other departments in the same building and what they do, even less so about what they are working for at the end of it all, and they are filled with small self help rewards and places and have to do some cringy team activities for more affinity and building a healthy workplace or something, while in this setting they also get some would they be true or not facts about their outside versions to calm them and make them feel that they are doing fine, I guess.

We also see the antagonists logically watching over the protagonists, prohibiting them from leaving the office, retrieving chips from brains of people that were going through a reintegration process to basically unify their brains once again. But I also have to point out how they let important people without constant watch and harm themselves, and how weird it is for them to let them be nearby people that know their outside selves, why would you risk your whole system like that? Eventually we get an explanation and repercussions, but you would think there would be countermeasures beforehand or quickly implemented after the fact, and also the chip retrieving scenes can be a bit weird, as definitely are the other departments that are found throughout the season, and what the heck was that ritual room and scene even about?

As the second season begins, we see the antagonists reforming the office, logically separating the team but uniting it once again for the sake of completing the project at large, new work conditions and places for the sake of preventing the finale of the first season to happen again, with even stop motion videos, also proving how powerful and untouchable the company really is, and the new floor boss supposedly checking on the mental wellbeing on the workers, while simultaneously dividing them from the inside.

Unlike the first season, we get more shots and scenes and events and story on the outside, exploring the time between the two seasons, the team besides the protagonist getting fired and trying to redo their outside lives before coming back in, and even suffering discrimination for going through the severance process while trying to find new jobs. Also now the team is divided for good after a certain event, and the new floor boss is reprimanded for letting things escalate to that level, which is more logical than how things were happening in the first season.

For the psychological side, we see the protagonist suffering from the same confusing episodes of memories switching as the character from the first season did, and even the same physical consequences, which raises the tension after we have seen what happened to the other guy.

There’s also an almost whole flashback episode to explain the situation of one of the main couples and how they got to the chronological beginning of the story, recontextualizing the plot, their motives and their interactions up until that point, exploring new themes, and a much needed look into what the company intends to do with this process, even if that ended up raising more questions as well. We also finally get to know the origins and the beginning of the severance and how the company has been affecting entire towns for who knows how much time with almost even religious arguments and followers.

There’s even a bit of an existential aspect in the season, as both sides of the protagonist confront themselves near the end and the inside points out that the outside basically asks for him to give up on the little everything he has in his life, even he himself as a whole, for the sake of the person who created him and only decided to reach him in times of need, and isn’t he right about all that? Easily one of the best moments of the series.

The atmosphere is as good as it was in the first season, if not better, and the production went up a notch with more general shots, more variety in settings and backgrounds, more dynamic movements with even more action scenes, and no more weird looking CGI. Unfortunately the directing wasn’t as varied and interesting as it was in the first season, and the pacing is quite slow in the beginning, and quite fast near the end, making some events feel convenient and hurried as a result, thus this entry is not as entertaining and well written as the one before it.

And I have to point out the weak points in the story. Why is the cabin not being monitored at all? Why is the company letting such a valuable woman go her way with such ease with all the potential risk she means for them? Why even have outside activities at all, with, again, all the potential risk that that means for the workers and even a very important person for the company amongst them? Why is the security in this company so bad that it is basically composed of just one guy? Would the plan of the protagonists even work against such a huge and powerful company?

And there are things that just feel weird for the sake of being weird, the whole backstory about the creator of the company, the whole goat department, their outfits, some lines of dialogues feeling cryptic or weirdly written just for the sake of sounding mysterious, the whole thing that are doing with the Cold Harbor file and all, like why? Because corporations are weird and evil?

And I have to say that a good portion of the focus on this season is dedicated to slice of life and romantic moments that are not as interesting as the psychological, sociological and philosophical aspects of the premise and concept.

I hope the third season gives an actual closure to the characters, resolves the loose ends about what this corporation even does and how it does it, they actually take actual measures about all the mess at the end of the second season, I hope for the series to stop having weird for the sake of being weird moments and scenes, and show the consequences once it is known outside what happened on the inside.

Basically I want the series to end on the next entry, because otherwise the show would overextend its welcome, drag itself unnecessarily just for the heck of it, and eventually decline in quality as a result. I rate the first season with an 8/10 and the second with a 7, thus a 7.5 for the whole thing for now.