‘The Consultant’ Review: Christoph Waltz’s Amazon Horror-Satire Is a Vibe in Search of a Show
His first series since Apple TV+’s Servant, Tony Basgallop’s Amazon show The Consultant confirms his place as a writer with no interest in choosing a lane.
Like Servant, The Consultant is a chamber piece of escalating creepiness — part horror, part satire — capable of occasionally getting under your skin and occasionally making you laugh, but never really committing to one tone or narrative hook for very long. And The Consultant is, like Servant, a format-defying half-hour dramedy that, ideally, could have been a feature or possibly even an episode of a suspense anthology; it’s perplexingly rushed at times and oppressively elongated at others.
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The hook of The Consultant is sure to be Christoph Waltz, delivering a compulsively watchable performance that falls right into the Oscar winner’s comfort zone of seductive weirdness that is alternately reptilian and lupine. It’s to Waltz’s credit that the sort of performance he has given many times on the big screen remains undeniably fun, a mixture of off-kilter line readings and odd physicality.
One thing Waltz’s turn never is, however, is surprising. When I describe the series and the character for you, you’re getting an instant picture in your mind of what Waltz’s performance is going to be and that’s exactly what it is. For a show that wants to be twisty and unpredictable — a show with basically no supporting performances or characters of note — that’s less than ideal.
Nat Wolff and Brittany O’Grady are actually the show’s ostensible stars, playing Craig and Elaine, employees at CompWare, a generic video game company. Craig is a coder, engaged to Patti (Aimee Carrero) and taking courses in Catholicism ahead of their wedding. Elaine is the assistant to the company’s enigmatic founder, a gaming wunderkind who is murdered within the show’s opening minutes.
Enter Regus Patoff (Waltz), who made some deal with the now-deceased founder to ease the company back into profitability. Patoff has no online footprint, no knowledge about gaming and a very particular management style. Elaine and Craig both immediately distrust him, especially when they learn details about how he got this consulting gig. They’re wary and form an uneasy alliance — they have a largely meaningless romantic past — to investigate, but they begin to see advantages to his presence when Patoff signs off on a game Craig has been developing and lets Elaine transition her title to “creative liaison,” whatever that means. Will those token gestures be enough to retain their allegiances when it becomes increasingly clear that something very dark is happening with Patoff?
Just as Servant found its resonance — however much resonance you happen to think it found — in universal insecurities about new parenthood, The Consultant taps into the awareness that everybody has, at some point, experienced a leadership change at work and begun to worry that the new boss might be the devil. Metaphorically. But what if it wasn’t a metaphor? What if the new boss’ weird peccadilloes — Patoff abolishes work-from-home, abruptly fires a staffer whose smell displeases him and thinks nothing of making 3 a.m. phone calls and demands — escalate? What if he invites himself to after-work drinks and potential homicides ensue? What if he keeps elaborate and intrusive files on every employee behind a mysterious locked door in the basement? What if his difficulties going up and down staircases are caused by some sort of monstrous deformity?
Is Patoff a weaselly bureaucrat or a full-blown dybbuk? Does he hold Craig and Elaine’s careers in his hands, or their lives? Is he at CompWare simply to make money — and for whom? — or does he have a more dastardly endgame? Does he have supernatural powers or is the show’s point that artificial workplace hierarchies give anybody with a big office the illusion of power?
Working from the novel by Bentley Little, Basgallop retains most of the show’s limited ambiguity when it comes to the shading of things. As played by Waltz, Patoff is creepy and inappropriate and casually cruel, but that doesn’t mean that he’s evil. He’s mostly just going about his job, which leaves the show’s narrative heavy-lifting to Craig and Elaine, which is a real problem because both their relationship and their respective arcs are barely half-formed. Craig spends a lot of time getting high and looking frazzled and that’s about all Wolff has to play. O’Grady gives Elaine’s ethically questionable upward mobility some dark enthusiasm, but I didn’t buy it as a character journey for a second.
If I didn’t know (or at least suspect) better, I’d think that Basgallop originally wrote The Consultant in 45-minute installments and then cut every other scene, irrespective of logic or continuity. The casualties of those cut scenes include Patti — with Carrero doing her best to find a personality for an ostensible main character who has maybe a dozen lines of dialogue — and every other member of the CompWare staff, almost none of whom have names or defining traits. The world of the show is so broadly and superficially sketched that you’d think it was a parable or allegory; the nod toward Patti’s religion is wholly symbolic; and treatment of video games and their impact on users or society at large borders on head-scratchingly reactionary.
I’ve seen conservative politicians bucking for reelection make less direct arguments about video games causing violence, while the show’s observations about encroaching technology and our modern surveillance state are too obvious to even count as a theme. To find a more thoughtful exploration of these topics, you’d have to go all the way back to Netflix’s Red Rose, which premiered last week.
Though it’s generally glossy and packed with interesting visual compositions — the surveillance thing is underlined by a procession of eye-catching overhead shots — The Consultant gives the impression that each of the show’s various directors has a different mandate. Matt Shakman (WandaVision) directed the pilot, and it’s more in the direction of a workplace satire with genre tropes at the edge, like Severance with less world-building. Karyn Kusama (Yellowjackets) directs the finale, which is a straight-up thriller for 15 minutes before fizzling out in a half-resolution that won’t leave anybody satisfied.
At a certain point, The Consultant is counting on Waltz as its exclusive source of humor and terror — and, as familiar as this performance is within his oeuvre, he anchors the long build-up more than capably. If, however, you’re placing that much responsibility on one actor and one character in an eight-episode season, you’d darned well better do something impressive by the end. Or at least interesting. The Consultant does not.
A bit like Apple TV+’s new format-blurring, lane-defying dramedy Hello Tomorrow!, The Consultant is a vibe in search of a show.
