An acclaimed Prime Video horror series, The Consultant, seems to combine many Stephen King tropes and beats with Severance, giving horror fans the perfect piece of workplace horror. The show is based on Bentley Little's book of the same name and only has eight episodes. It features Christoph Waltz as its morally ambiguous lead who plays the mysterious titular consultant in the show.
On the surface, Prime Video's The Consultant follows a simple story where it walks through a titular consultant's pursuit of saving a gaming company after its CEO is murdered. However, the more it progresses, the more it subtly reveals that something evil and supernatural is pulling all the threats from behind the scenes. It is a compelling watch throughout its runtime and can be binged in one weekend.
Prime Video’s The Consultant Combines Stephen King’s Terrors With Severance Corporate Satire
The Consultant primarily takes place inside the office of a mobile gaming firm called CompWare. Like Severance, The Consultant makes a narrative device out of its corporate setting to highlight how modern tech companies are driven by absurd, cult-like work cultures.
Just like Lumon's workers in Severance are governed by arbitrary rules and punishments, the titular consultant in the Prime Video series introduces bizarre and humiliating policies in CompWare. In both, employees gradually lose all free will, which diminishes their sense of individual identity. As a result, they start competing among themselves instead of understanding the true purpose of their job.
Severance's portrayal of corporate absurdity inclines more towards comedy and has a Kafkaesque essence to it. In The Consultant, these elements head into an eerily uncanny territory where the show gradually starts becoming reminiscent of many Stephen King books.
The show's titular consultant, Regus Patoff, reminds one of Leland Gaunt in Needful Things or Randall Flagg in The Stand. Little seems to be known about his past or motives, but he has a demonic presence that makes him seem inhuman. Instead of forcing employees to push themselves, he merely manipulates them into unlocking greed and paranoia.
Prime Video's The Consultant also hints at how he is disguising himself as a human by revealing strange anomalies in his behavior. Similar to Stephen King's characters, the helpless employees in the show find themselves succumbing to an influential evil force in an isolated setting.
The Consultant Is Surprisingly Obscure Despite Having Christoph Waltz As Its Lead
Christoph Waltz has an incredible range as an actor. However, he is truly in his element when he plays morally complex or outright evil characters. Owing to this, even to this day, he is best known for his chilling portrayal of Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Prime Video's The Consultant allows him to leverage his strengths by playing an intimidating and seemingly demonic character.
As expected, Waltz leaves no stone unturned and brilliantly portrays the morally hollow character. On paper, there is nothing rootable about the titular consultant in the Prime Video series. Yet, Christoph Waltz's performance ensures that even his most unsettling actions become compelling to watch.
The Consultant is, by no means, as perfect as Severance or some of Stephen King's better TV adaptations. However, it still ensures that it leaves no dull moments in its eight-episode runtime, leaving viewers with enough chills to keep thinking about it after its credits start rolling.
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