The secret reason you find Severance so disturbing

Severance is a bewildering and befuddling show that balances the surreal and mundane to create something unique. 

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that viewers worldwide have fallen in love with the Apple TV+ show and the Macrodata Refinement (MDF) team. After all, what’s more relatable than hating your job (Editor’s note: Excuse me?), and is there anything more terrifying than the thought of being trapped at work forever? 

What’s worse is that Lumon seems willing to do terrible things to its Innie employees, safe in the knowledge their Outie will be placated by a coupon to Pip’s Bar and Grille.

Yet beyond the obvious horror of an eternal workday that only ends where you’re effectively killed by retirement, there’s another reason you might find yourself so perturbed while watching Mark wander the corridors of Lumon. 

It makes no sense…

Apple TV+

Some part of you has probably noticed it by now (your own Innie perhaps?), even if you’re not consciously aware of it. Lumon doesn’t make sense. And I don’t mean the goats or the “bad numbers” don’t make sense, although they don’t; I mean, the actual building is architecturally impossible (or the Severed Floor is, at least).

We’ve seen characters wander the office halls, navigating through a seemingly endless labyrinth of dull white walls. Yet, if you watch carefully, you’ll see the MDF team regularly double back on themselves or take impossible turns into spaces that shouldn’t (and can’t) exist within the established internal space. 

It’s a clever choice by the Severance team to design the Severed Floor like this, which lends the show a degree of subtle eeriness. Stanley Kubrick famously did something very similar with the interior of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining by using architectural typos to create an insidious and ingenious sense of wrongness that isolates the characters from each other. 

Yet beyond this rather bombastic bit of production design, there’s another reason you find Lumon scarier than a Sunday before work, and it’s because the Severed Floor is a liminal space.

What’s a liminal space? Well, they’re pretty boring, to be honest. They’re hallways, airport waiting rooms, hotel corridors, even plain old doorways. The only thing they have in common is that they exist as places of transition. You have to use them to get to where you’re going; as silly as it may sound, that makes them scary.

Compels me though…

Apple TV+

You see, humans hate the unknown; they crave certainty and the assurance of the familiar. That’s why people have favorite places; they’re associated with the comfort of the known. Liminal spaces, however, by their very nature, are places of change that are always tinged with the dread of possibility. 

On some subconscious level, then, liminal spaces trigger the primitive lizard part of your brain, overriding your common sense and making you feel fear and unease. Have you ever walked down a hotel corridor alone and felt a strange sense of unease? Perhaps picked up the pace to get to where you’re going quicker? That was the fear of the liminal, your caveman-like desire to seek out the warmth of certainty. 

Furthermore, Severance adds to this unease by stripping the corridors of any context. As such, you rarely see other Lumon workers wandering through the Severed Floor’s halls or using the offices. 

Again, in the back of your mind, it raises so many questions about this space: why is it so big? Why don’t we see people working here? Who’s office is that? It all works to create a deep sense of anxiety that not only are you heading into the unknown but that you’re going alone. 

That’s the real secret of Severance. It doesn’t just use the mundane as fuel for the fire of existential dread; it taps into the subconscious part of our brain (our very own Innie) to terrify us. Looking for more hot takes? Well, read our Severance Season 2 review for our most scalding opinion yet and we’ve also got a piece explaining Severance Season 2’s final set back.