The consummate style isn’t only for the look of the thing. The cameras sweeping over the top of sets and looking down directly from above lend scenes a thematically apt sense of surveillance. Each of the ten episode’s closing credits play out almost in silence, watching a character continue an action long after we’d have expected a scene to be cut. It feels illicit, like we’re spying rather than being invited – perfect for the genre.
There’s no futuristic take on the world of 2022 either, quite the opposite. The four-years-later segments are flatter and more wan than their 2018 counterparts. The world doesn’t only resemble our own, it resembles our past.
That’s especially the case with Department of Defence worker Thomas Carrasco (Shea Whigham), who appears to have been pulled straight out of Three Days Of The Condor or something like it. The low-level government employee who sniffs a rat and goes hunting in a forest of bureaucracy and cover-ups, from his office cubicle to his search through fields of documents in storage, Carrasco’s everyman is an enjoyable throwback to the paranoid world of the 1970s conspiracy movie.
That’s far from the only cinematic echo here. Esmail’s style is wittily referential and evokes everything from The Twilight Zone to The Prisoner and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, to those Watergate-era thrillers. His style is creative and packed with quotes – long shots and Hitchcockian zooms underline key plot moments.
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