How ‘Severance' Uses Old Tricks to Make Its Office Hell

New York Times

21-03-2025

Contains spoilers about past episodes but not the Season 2 finale.
In 'Severance,' the Apple TV+ series about a shadowy company where some employees have their consciousness split into two parts, with the 'innie' doing all the work and the 'outie' remembering none of it, the office is sparse and lifeless.
The show reinforces that theme with its cinematography and production design. Here are some of the ways 'Severance' invokes and inverts classic film tricks to create its corporate hell.
Repetition Removes Individuality
From the earliest days of moving images, filmmakers have used the rigid geometry of desks and cubicles and dense repetition to create images of people together, yet isolated, trapped and stripped of identity by corporate bosses.
Films like 'The Apartment,' from 1960 (below, top left), and even Pixar's 2004 animated movie 'The Incredibles' (top right) use these repetitive shots to suggest a corporate mass that takes away individual identities to instead create 'company men,' said Jill Levinson, a professor at Babson College and the author of 'The American Success Myth on Film.'
Grids fill the screen in those movies and others, including in shots of the oppressive call center of the 2018 satire 'Sorry to Bother You' (above left) and the lifeless corporate floor of Mattel in 'Barbie,' from 2023 (above right), creating a claustrophobic sense of confinement.
One of the earliest examples of this image on film came in King Vidor's 1928 silent movie 'The Crowd':
In Jacques Tati's 'Playtime,' from 1967, Tati's recurring character, Monsieur Hulot, finds himself out of sync with the impersonal settings of midcentury Paris:
'Severance' uses some of the same approach. The Lumon Industries office was inspired by the workplaces of the 1960s, Jeremy Hindle, the show's production designer, told the architecture magazine Dezeen. Back then most offices were very clearly places to work, creating a strict separation between office and domestic life, he said. 'I find workplaces now kind of 'fake' workplaces — they're home-ish.'
The opening sequence modifies the multitudinous office shot to reflect the show's splintering identities, with a grid of desks that has the same worker in every cubicle: the innie Mark S, played by Adam Scott:
In other ways, Levinson said, 'Severance' bucks office-film convention. Instead of leaning on multiples, it most commonly isolates its workers in unnervingly large rooms.
Office Fixtures Trap Workers
The concept of confinement is central to 'Severance.' While many characters chafe against the limits of their roles in life, for the innies the imprisonment is literal: They are effectively trapped on the severed floor, only perceiving life in the workplace.
The sense of restriction is reinforced by the low ceilings in 'Severance,' including in the hallways and the offices themselves, Levinson noted. Low ceilings trap characters and are useful tools particularly in horror movies, like in the claustrophobic corporate spaceship in 'Alien' (1979) or the tight architecture of the Overlook Hotel in 'The Shining' (1980).
The corridors in 'Severance' recall an extreme example of low office ceilings: the 7 ½ floor in 'Being John Malkovich,' where employees have to physically hunch over as they exit the elevator:
The work itself can also be the cage. In one scene in the first season of 'Severance,' Dylan G.'s (Zach Cherry) screen resembles a shot from the 1996 movie 'American Beauty,' with both characters looking at their reflections trapped behind the work on their screens:
If the spaces or the work itself form the prisons of office life, the wardens are the clocks. Shots of them are another visual trope in workplace movies, one that calls back to the symbolic clocks in old German Expressionist films: Employees repeatedly glance at the time, waiting to be free. (Levinson shows her students a montage of similar shots across decades.)
It happens in the 2002 movie 'About Schmidt,' as Jack Nicholson, as a retiring insurance man, stares at the clock waiting for his final day of work to end …
… and in the aptly titled 1997 comedy 'Clockwatchers,' about four young women working in a soul-sucking office:
Because innies exist only on the severed floor, there is little reason for one to look forward to heading home. In the second season, when Mark S. looks at the clock as the workday winds down, it is a sign that risky reintegration surgery to combine his severed halves is starting to work.
The Boss's Throne
In 'Severance,' the managers on the severed floor exert quiet corporate power from behind the desks in their private offices. Severed workers stand before the seated supervisor, waiting to speak as in a royal court.
The filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen often use that image of 'the man behind the desk' in their films, including, clockwise from top left, 'The Big Lebowski,' 'The Hudsucker Proxy,' 'Fargo' and 'Barton Fink.' The boss's desk is a barrier between the protagonist and real power:
Employees' desks are, by contrast, vulnerable. Their cubicles make them easy targets for bosses 'just swinging by,' like in the 1999 workplace malaise movie 'Office Space' …
… or the accommodations could be absurdly ineffective, as in the 1985 sci-fi black comedy 'Brazil.' One desk is divided by a wall and split between two employees who must play tug of war for the work surface:
The boss's desk and its power are consistent, even if the person behind it isn't. Between the two seasons of 'Severance,' the supervisor Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) is replaced by her subordinate Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman); he takes her place both at the desk and in the same shots she occupied.
Elevators as Symbolic Portals
In 'Severance,' the office elevator is a site of transformation between a severed worker's two identities. As it nears the severed floor, the elevator acts as a breaker switch between the innie and outie identity, with the innies waking up on the office floor, locked away from the outside world.
In the 1957 drama 'A Face in the Crowd,' the main character's fall from grace is made literal as he goes down the network television company's elevator, watching the buttons tick to lower floors:
By contrast in 'The Hudsucker Proxy,' the inventor turned executive played by Tim Robbins is crammed into the back of an elevator until the operator realizes he is important and goes express to the top floor. The doors close behind him as he looks uneasy with his ascent:
The other pivotal elevator in 'Severance' is at the end of a pitch black corridor. It goes to the mysterious testing floor, and it haunts one character so much that he repeatedly paints it in gobs of black oil paint without knowing what it is. That elevator is all descent.
Infantilizing Perks
Lumon Industries emphasizes its workplace perks for innies, which create brief spots of color within the office's otherwise drab environs. In 'Severance,' employees strive for melon bars, finger traps and Music Dance Experiences as rewards for their hard work, supposed morale boosts that are infantilizing and ultimately — and laughably — ineffective.
Other shows, like 'Silicon Valley' and 'Broad City,' have also memorably used moments of forced fun to emphasize the awkward sterility of office life:
In 'The Office,' a sad celebration features a depressing fruit tray …
… a forebear of the various melon-based functions in 'Severance.'
'Office Space' includes an even sadder birthday scene, in which the downtrodden employee Milton is passed over for a slice like the most unpopular kid at a party:
It's a deeply uncomfortable moment for Milton, but is it any more awkward than other petty workplace slights? It's yet another office indignity most workers would like to forget, the kind that 'Severance' visually aggregates in order to build its humiliating hell for innies — and spare the outies.
It all may make severed life seem not so bad.