A Creepy Comedy Thriller Filled with Mystery

CEOs were paid on average 399 times what their workers earned in 2021, and yet, the higher they are paid, the more they tank their firms. A fascinating paper from the University of Utah studied CEO pay in relation to their companies’ stock performance over a 17-year period and found up to a 10% negative correlation. These wealthy elites often introduce disastrous policies that satisfy some shareholders and show that they actually did something, and then abandon ship before the company consequently performs poorly. As they jump, their fall is softened by a golden parachute.

Such is life. The Consultant, a new series from Prime Video based on Bentley Little’s novel, isn’t exactly didactic or political about this, but it is a vicious little satire all the same. The eight-episode show, created and written by Tony Basgallop (Servant, Inside Men), follows a video game company that earns a great deal of money off tiny mobile phone games akin to Candy Crush.

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When the CEO is mysteriously shot and killed by a child on a school field trip, an enigmatic consultant arrives to take his place and steer the ship. What he actually does, though, is sow chaos and division, leading some employees straight into an existential crisis. It’s a combination of Stephen King and Succession, and while it doesn’t always work (especially toward the end), it’s consistently unique, creepy, and darkly funny.

What Is The Consultant About?

The series is a mystery of sorts, and part of that mystery is discerning what exactly The Consultant is even about. An excellent cast keeps viewers engaged while trying to parse this out. Brittany O’Grady keeps portraying starkly different characters (heartfelt musicals like Little Voice and Star are a world away from The White Lotus and Black Christmas), and her role in The Consultant continues the trend wonderfully.

She stars as Elaine Hayman, the endlessly put-upon assistant to the CEO of CompWare, the mobile gaming company where the show is set. It’s a hyper-modern, lavish office building, complete with glass staircase, giant screens, and moody neon lights, and it’s filled with employees who seem to fill more time than they use. This changes when the CEO is killed and, late at night, Regus Patoff enters CompWare with a fine suit, weird smile, and a great deal of confidence.

Christoph Waltz Is an Enigma Begging to Be Solved

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He’s an odd man, to say the least, and Christoph Waltz is perfect at embodying these quirks and using the awkwardness to his advantage. Patoff is an enigma, but a ruthless one; he immediately announces that anyone who works from home has exactly one hour to arrive at the office, or they’re fired. When a woman in a wheelchair gets to a side door one minute after the hour is up, he locks it and fires her. Despite the cruelty, he’s genial and very personal, always keeping the employees (and viewer) on their toes. Nobody knows where he came from or why he’s even there, but they mostly go with it. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” as The Who sing.

Related: How The Consultant Trailer Introduces Audiences to a New Kind of Workplace

Elaine and her close co-worker, Craig (played by Nat Wolff), quietly take matters into their own hands and begin snooping around, hoping to learn more about their smiling tyrant. Their investigation is a slippery one that doesn’t exactly lead to satisfactory answers, but rather myriad mysteries and seemingly impossible suggestions.

The Consultant goes to some really bizarre places without ever fully embracing genre territory; it’s been described as a ‘black comedy thriller science-fiction horror’ series, and while it flirts with all of these, it’s never entirely one of those labels. It may be frustrating for some, but The Consultant ultimately leaves it up to the viewer to imagine the solid truth of the matter.

Patoff is an unforgettable character, and Waltz lives up to his potential. He scarfs down churros, needs a ridiculous amount of help to climb the stairs, and performs an invasively intimate smell test on his employees and forces one to scrub himself down with a soapy sponge. Despite his somewhat diminutive height and frame, Waltz can be incredibly intimidating (perhaps best seen in Inglourious Basterds and Spectre) but also very endearing (as in Big Eyes and Django Unchained). He somehow combines the two properties here, as a monstrous riddle who we can’t stop trying to solve. He’s very funny, but extremely awful, and is undoubtedly the best part of The Consultant.

Regus Patoff Is the Unforgettable Consultant

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What Patoff does to the office is fascinating to watch. He almost becomes the embodiment of the most ruthless forms of capitalism, and everyone who comes into contact with him ultimately has to stare down the truth of their relationship to capital and economic ambition. This is best seen through the different paths that Elaine and Craig take in their gradual dealings with Patoff, but is perhaps most explicit in one little scene midway through The Consultant.

A spacious personal office is available on the second floor, as opposed to the open-plan design on the first floor which brings to mind so many tech companies. Instead of choosing someone to take the office based on merit, privilege, or luck, Patoff tells the employees that they can choose who wants it, and leaves them to their own devices. Instead of careful conversations or any democratic process, it becomes a brutally competitive race among the employees to see who can force their way into the office and lock it behind them first. It’s just one scene, but it says so much about unregulated late capitalism and the inhumanity, competition, selfishness, and boorishness that it so frequently produces.

Patoff isn’t the traditional villain, in this sense, but a kind of catalyst, the spirit of capital itself, possessing everyone around him. Economic advancement and the lure of success surround him, but so does death, confusion, and a ruinous rot of the soul. In Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test, which journalistically compares the qualities of successful CEOs with the DSM definition of psychopathy, he recounts this conversation — “But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,’ I said. ‘Serial killers ruin families,’ shrugged Bob. ‘Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

A Polished Show Leads to an Unsatisfactory Ending

Amazon Studios

The Consultant looks amazing, thanks to several television pros behind the camera. Dan Attias, Charlotte Brandström, Alexis Ostrander, Karyn Kusama, and Matt Shakman have directed more than a thousand hours of television between them, and their experience shines. Shakman (who directed all of WandaVision and will helm the upcoming MCU version of Fantastic Four) sets the tone in the pilot — characters encased in glass, almost always indoors, surrounded by screens and stylish design; cool but creepy, shiny but weird, funny but disturbing.

Basgallop’s script loses its way a bit by the end, though, introducing so many mysteries that it has no intention of actually solving. Some of these are extremely far-fetched, to the point of horror and science-fiction. Viewers who want everything to be solved and easily understandable will be disappointed by the end of The Consultant, though the journey to its ambiguous conclusion is fascinating and extremely watchable.

The Irrational Meaning of The Consultant on Prime Video

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The more ridiculous sci-fi and horror elements, combined with the lack of actual answers, means that one is better off taking The Consultant allegorically. In that sense, it works very well as a highly unique satire of corporate life and its alienating horrors. It’s downright absurdist in parts, as the investigation into Patoff reaches an impasse where rational explanation can no longer account for what’s happening. “Psychopaths [make] the world go around […] society is an expression of that particular sort of madness,” writes Ronson in his aforementioned book. “I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?”

With all the outlandish mysteries and irrational genre elements, it’s no wonder that the series has been called a black comedy thriller with sci-fi horror elements. But one label that people may have missed about The Consultant, at least in terms of the current socioeconomic situation, is documentary. From MGM Television and Amazon Studios, all eight episodes of The Consultant are now available to watch on Prime Video.

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