The Consultant: Adult morality meets The Office

The archetypal ruthless office boss and a Gen Z gaming company collide in this twisty little comedy thriller.

Christoph Waltz in a scene from The Consultant

It used to be said that having a job was a life saver, improving an individual’s health and overall attitude to life. But you get the sense these days that the stress of many workplaces now outweighs any possible benefits and even poses a threat to our health. How often do we find ourselves in a workplace environment where you feel uncomfortable, undervalued, and unappreciated?

As Ricky Gervais’s David Brent says in The Office, “You think you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s only some bugger with a torch bringing you more work.” The office passes a long shadow over our humdrum lives.

Which brings us to The Consultant, a tasty little comedy thriller with which I’ve just caught up, an eight-episode series, created and written by the British Tony Basgallop. It’s an extremely loose adaptation of Bentley Little’s 2015 novel of the same name. By Basgallop’s own admission the screenwriter needed to take some liberties with the book to update it to 2023, as “everything that’s happened in the workplace in the past eight years has been a huge change”.

The novel, narrated mainly from the perspective of Craig, a middle manager and dedicated family man, has been described as “a satire about the sulphurous upper echelons of corporate capitalism and the supremacy of the consultant class even over the companies they ostensibly serve.”

And the same critic suggested it descends “into full horror: run-of-the-mill mind games give way to nightmarish retreats and business meetings in rooms covered in blood.” (It should be noted that author Bentley Little was dubbed “The horror poet laureate” by Stephen King himself.)

Another reviewer said Little’s “commentary of corporate soul-sucking and stripping away of individuality and personal rights and freedoms is lost among all the horniness.”

But Basgallop says he fell in love with Little’s cruel sense of humour, “his mischief making”, when the book was passed to him while he was looking for the subject of a new TV series: “I wanted to bring in that sense of ‘you shouldn’t be doing this’: things you shouldn’t be saying and things you shouldn’t be doing.”

Basgallop, is best known as the creator and showrunner for the Apple TV+ series Servant, the well-regarded creepy-babysitter thriller, executive-produced by M. Night Shyamalan, described as “Repulsion by way of Rosemary’s Baby by way of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” He also played with genre on the horror series Outcast and the espionage show Berlin Station.

But he says bringing a dark social satire like The Consultant to life wasn’t easy. “I think the challenge is the word ‘dark’. As soon as the people who are commissioning shows hear that word, I think they run a little bit scared. Or they used to. I think it’s slightly easier now.”

What’s essential in being commissioned these days is the right level of humour running through the show to take the edge off it, he says. “It’s kind of like the little sprinkle of sugar on top if you need something like that.”

The series really looks satirically at the dynamics of power and hierarchies in business, the way employees so often feel a need to fend for themselves, at the expense of others. And the way hierarchical structures imply inequality and inequity, instead of adopting ways to organise that are more mutually respectful and reinforcing.

The Consultant features an impressive cast, including Christoph Waltz, who also serves as an executive producer; as the titular character Nat Wolff, Brittany O’Grady and Aimee Carrero. And although its 30-minute episodes don’t allow all that much for them to do, apart from Waltz, they are a convincing bunch of young people caught up in something that verges on the supernatural.

Matt Shakman sets up the first episode establishing the visual style. He’s an experienced director with episodes of more than 40 shows to his credit including Game of Thrones, Fargo, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and WandaVision.

His director of photography is the technically clever Jess Hall, who’s worked on feature films like Hot Fuzz to Apple TV commercials, and who was responsible for many of the technical accomplishments and visual techniques of WandaVision working with Shakman.

They were able to create the inspired tonal transitions disrupting the comfort of sitcom conventions and adding a sense of menace and unease, qualities that certainly distinguish their approach to The Consultant.

The first episode, Creator, finds a bunch of schoolkids being shown around the hi-tech premises of gaming software company CompWare by assistant Elaine, played with a deft touch by the rather glamorous Brittany O’Grady. She’s oddly offhand about her workplace. “Can anyone tell me what a Coder does, because I seriously don’t know these days?” she asks the kids, who of course are way ahead of her and are totally at home in the digital universe.

She takes them to see the firm’s creative genius, the young CEO Sang Woo (Brian Yoon), and shuts them in his office. Then, as she and top coder Craig, an agreeably dishevelled Nat Wolff, chat together, a series of gunshots ring out. They find Sang sprawled in his chair and a kid holding a gun who says, “I want my mummy”. (Later the newspaper quotes him as saying, “The devil made me do it,” a reference it seems to the destructive effects of gaming and whether video games can lead to a killing spree.)

Before the sun is up, a mysterious man enters the building where Craig and Elaine happen to have met, she to collect surveillance cameras Sang has placed around the offices and he, a bit of a stoner, to collect dope concealed in his office drawer.

Waltz’s impeccably dressed chap introduces himself as Regus Patoff (“It’s Crimean Russian,” he says cryptically of his name) and tells them he’s there to consult on all matters of business. He takes over Sang’s office, which is still bloodied by his murder.

Patoff is cold-blooded, existentially blank and alienated. He has no emotions or doubts and is immediately totally at home in the metallic, splashily lit offices of CompWare, even though he appears to have no idea that video games can be played on phones.

He is sadistic and at the same time oddly frail – at one point he is unable to cope with the company’s staircase and needs help to ascend. Seldom absent is that distinctive Waltz smile as he does the most outrageous things.

First up he fires remote workers who cannot return to the office within an hour after he calls a staff meeting. Among them is a wheelchair-bound employee, known to staff as “Wheelchair Lois”, who misses the cut off by seconds and is stranded at the front door.

Noticing a foul smell of “putrid fruit” – no-one else does – Patoff goes around sniffing staff as he introduces himself to them, initially firing Ian (Michael Charles Vaccaro) as the culprit. Redeemed somehow by the brave Elaine, Ian is reduced to taking a demeaning sponge bath in his office making use of a crate of Sparkles Soap.

It’s a horrifying scene but oddly, mordantly funny. As is another scene with Elaine who is cleaning the blood from the office where Patoff states his role is simply to improve the business for Mr Sang. “Mr Sang is gone,” she says. “What’s left of him is in my bucket.”

Patoff, it seems, has a contract but just what is his relationship to a Russian manufacturer who signed a similar contract and was decapitated two weeks later?

Shakman says he looked at many Korean movies, especially Parasite, taking that distinctive tone “that kind of rides the line between comedy and drama and thriller.” He was after a juxtaposition between “this very kind of old-world character” in Waltz’s Patoff and this new gen Z modern gaming company.

“Also, the idea that there’s a youngness to that. The games that they play seem very innocent and simple, which stands in ironic juxtaposition to all the more complicated adult morality games that are happening in the office as a result of Patoff showing up,” he says.

It’s quirky and bingeable, a kind of toxic nightmare leavened by moments of surreal humour. Waltz is always amusing and Wolff and O’Grady are good leads. It’s a nice example of the way film noir, in this contemporary iteration, once known only to cineastes, is now such a familiar element of our cultural vocabulary.

The Consultant, streaming on Prime Video