Setting a show in world this insular and claustrophobic requires an attention to fine detail when working with the characters who inhabit it. True, it’s the kind of genre storytelling painted with very broad strokes, so I’m not expecting these people to suddenly become the cast of The Sopranos or Mad Men or Halt and Catch Fire. But what writer Rémi Aubuchon (PSA: The writers of the WGA deserve fair treatment and fair pay from the enormous corporations that profit off their labor), director David Semel, and actors Amelie Child-Villiers and Iain Glen achieve here is extraordinary nonetheless. You can feel how real the crack-up between them is — stemming from their exhaustion and frustration at the end of their respective days, triggered by the sudden clangor of the alarm and the threat of the smoke, built up over time as Juliette grew to resent her father for keeping her at a distance and her father grew to resent himself for doing so as well.
Thanks to Child-Villiers you can hear the absolute misery in Juliette’s voice as she runs from the room, blocked by Semel so that her back is turned to both her father and the camera as she mourns for the childhood she’s losing and blames him for the loss. Glen (very convincingly de-aged by makeup, a wig, and I’d imagine a little bit of digital sleight-of-hand) holds back just long enough before delivering the doctor’s retort to convey the fact that this is a failure of self-control for him; he knows he should not play tit for tat with his grieving daughter, but his pain is such that he can’t stop himself from venting it.
Taken in totality, this scene gives what could be a rote partial-orphan origin story for Juliette (genre fiction absolutely loves killing off its protagonists’ mothers) and makes it something raw and lived-in. This in turn makes the Silo feel less like something from a YA novel you read and forget about and more like a real place, with real people in it. It’s an achievement.
I reviewed today’s episode of Silo for Decider.
Tags: decider, reviews, silo, TV, TV reviews