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Severance (Apple TV+)

Severance is so different from anything else currently around that it’s difficult to decide exactly what it is. Is it a paranoid thriller? A black comedy? Sci-fi? Horror? Well, imagine if Franz Kafka had written a workplace dramedy and David Lynch had filmed it.

There are four workers in the mysterious Lumon Industries ‘macro data refinement’ office and they’ve each voluntarily undergone the ‘severance’ process – a surgical procedure which means that when they’re at work, they can’t remember their non-work life, and when they’re at home, they can’t remember what they do in the office. Why would anyone do this? Maybe to forget – the same reason that supposedly used to draw recruits to the French Foreign Legion.

That’s certainly the case for Mark (Adam Scott, left), initially the only employee whose outside life we see. He wants to be able to forget a terrible loss for a few hours a day. But severance effectively splits a person in two – creating an ‘innie’ and an ‘outie’. And some of the office-bound innies are beginning to resent the life imposed on them by their outies.

It’s funny, creepy, visually arresting and full of surprises with a really great cast including Christopher Walken, Patricia Arquette and John Turturro.