“The Consultant”, a mysterious Christoph Waltz in a dystopian work environment (score 6½) – Corriere.it

Don’t be afraid of the surreal. “The Consultant,” the new series from Toni Basgallop (“The Servant”) and now on Prime Video, is a variation on many of the themes of American cinema, starting with office slavery. It’s all based on a novel by Bentley Little (who Stephen King promoted as a poet of horror), set in a mobile video game company in Los Angeles that drives teenagers and others crazy, whose very young boss Sang Woo is a young antisocial and An asexual Korean man is killed one day in a completely unexpected way by a child who may be possessed the old-fashioned way.

You can see the staff arriving (and we are only at the beginning of the 8 episodes of 30 minutes each) a strange guy who is prevented from climbing the stairs, a certain very enigmatic and very dictatorial Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz, Tarantino’s beloved villain, clearly the focus of the seriousness of the operation), who is said to have inherited the management of the company from the deceased and was a brave management consultant who saved from ruin a company that was in serious crisis. A strange guy who accuses the employees interferes in their lives, but mistreats the mother of the murdered man, who came for a sad and disinterested visit. Using unique and reactionary methods, he develops an attachment by tying whoever he wants, whoever is working remotely or is sick, to two employees who purr around him: Elaine (Brittany O’Grady) and Craig (Nat Wolff) , whom he entangles in shady dealings in human trafficking, especially the boy he takes with him on a strange nighttime raid that ends in a kidnapping.

Obviously there isn’t much that can be said about this: The tension is there until halfway through, and it increases because this patoff promises its own existential or fatal dimension, which then supports the conclusion, but in the last part we move towards a triumph of the illogical and unreal, i.e. in general can happen, anything is allowed, directors change so much. Of course, Waltz is very good and understands his craft very well, so he edits this crazy man running around barefoot, letting us see his boyish side as the two underlings dream of making careers and dream up a video game in the jungle, who is instantly popular and seems to get society back on the right track.

Let’s say right away that in the apparent similarity “The Consultant” is much better than “Scission”, repetitive beyond suspicion: But the world of work is viewed from a more than dystopian perspective, it is a vision that is light years away from reality, it becomes a grotesque caricature and almost to ridicule. In the meantime, the plot continues with leaps of championship logic, but it could be that there will also be a second season in the name of Waltz, but even the two unfortunate little managers do well in their ambiguous characters, in which no one has a real one Psychology has But all row to give vent to the dreamlike aspects of a story that neither ends with a twist nor ever becomes a creative criticism of capitalism or the world of video games and its social dangers brought about by crime in the first episode announced by a blonde child with icy eyes, the little advisor of tomorrow.