The consultant is above all for those who love the more disturbing side of Christoph Waltz, the actor who won two Oscars for Inglourious Basterds and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, who you could say enjoys feeling typecast. If in the failed Most dangerous game he played a businessman who proposed desperate men to become human prey in exchange for a fortune, in the Amazon Prime Video series he puts himself in the shoes of a disturbing consultant who puts workers to the test of a technology company, to the point that they fear for their own lives. It is, in short, a humorous capitalist nightmare.
The setting is a video game company, CompWare, whose president dies in a terrifying situation: when receiving kids from a school, one of the preteens shoots him mercilessly. Automatically, Elaine (Brittany O'Grady), who was the deceased's assistant, and Craig (Nat Wolff), who was one of the engineers, assume that they will be out of a job. They dread the idea of having to apply for job offers. But suddenly, Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz) appears in the company, a mysterious consultant who has the reins of the company. Her goal of him? Get rid of company ballasts and increase productivity. The thing is, as Elaine and Craig soon discover, this man is more disturbing than either of them can imagine.
Here, make no mistake, we are not dealing with a black comedy about bosses who are bastards (who are also) but rather a satire that forces the viewer to consider to what extent we are dealing with a man or even an diabolical presence. Its author is Tony Basgallop, who has had enough fun moving between black comedy, thriller and psychological horror in Servant, the series produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. And here, further into comedy and satire while adapting a Bentley Little novel, he introduces a key scenario to reveal the extent to which two standard workers, Elaine and Craig, can pervert their humanity when put to the test.
The pilot, in fact, reveals to what extent The Consultant is a satire for the script's ability to exaggerate (and not only when Waltz can shine with dialogues that always hide absolute cynicism and darkness). Every time CompWare employees talk about being homeless and having to look for a new job, they talk about “out there” as if they were living in a post-apocalyptic reality. The scenes outside the office show a normal world but they behave as if the loss of payroll turned them into the mushroom men of The last of us and the streets were full of infected.
Losing your job, even after working at a leading company in the industry, is interpreted as financial ruin and possibly death. That "out there" is a resource that The Consultant places, without concealment, in the voracious and sarcastic criticism of the liberal and capitalist system: when someone leaves the labor wheel, they are stripped of existential meaning, like an obsolete tool, and they remain out in the open, expelled from a system that only values productivity.
In this sense, it can be said that the Amazon series makes the ideal tandem with Apple TV's Severance, that psychological thriller that poses the dissociation of the human being into two identities: the humanist self and the work self, which is activated upon entering the job position and who cannot communicate with the outside identity. The only pity is that, while Severance is a narrative of increasing tension and drama that knows how to develop its powerful initial concept, The Consultant remains somewhat redundant in entertainment.
It has the premise. It has the stage, in which there is no shortage of glass floors and walls and cameras to increase the paranoia of those involved (and even a secret file). He has a comfortable and content Cristoph Waltz having fun with his particular lab rats, those workers desperate for his attention. And he has something to say, even assuming the reading is crystal clear. But the problem is that Basgallop doesn't know how to take the story in such surprising directions as he thinks and he doesn't know how to implode it in the final stretch with the level of madness that he seems to promise at all times.
What would have happened to The Consultant if Basgallop, instead of writing eight 30-minute episodes, had planned the adaptation as a 100-minute movie.
