We’ve probably all had jobs we’d like to forget, but to actually split your mind between work life and personal life – so you have literally no recollection of your nine-to-five after you clock out – well, that might be taking things a little bit too far. Not so for Lumon Industries, the shady corporation at the heart of Severance, a super-stylised thriller that’s pitching itself somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram between 2004’s brainwipe love story Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, George Orwell’s 1984 and office-set advertising saga Mad Men.
Directed in part by Ben Stiller, the 10-part Apple+ series revolves around Lumon’s mysterious “macro data refinement” department, where all workers must undergo the “severance” process. A kind of HR-dictated trepanning, it causes the memories between employees’ office hours and personal life to be “spatially dictated”, so that when they’re at work they have no concept of who they are in the outside world, and vice versa. If that all sounds like a Kafkaesque nightmare, it’s because it is.
