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

Clocks, elevators and cubicles become dystopian signifiers in the television show, which invokes and inverts workplace cinema.

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.

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.”