Who is Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz)? He is the saviour of ailing companies that did not even know about their precarious economic situation. He is the consultant who achieves results ("He has shown us all what we are capable of"). He is the briefcase carrier who aligns his pencils to the millimetre, who uses notebooks, processes paper lists with long columns of numbers and a mechanical typewriter, as if fallen out of the digitally optimized era. He is the man who doesn't blink and always introduces himself to company leaders with the same words: "I came from far away to offer you a gift." A Dana gift, of course. In order to receive the gift, they must first take their own lives.
You don't have to ponder for a long time in the little nasty office horror series "The Consultant" who this Regus Patoff is and what he has to offer. In any case, his gift is so attractive that the CEOs accept the offer to kill themselves and accept their own murder for a violent surcharge. The nature of the gift, which is not so mysterious for believers or Bible scholars, should nevertheless be concealed here, otherwise a large part of the joke of the series is immediately gone.
The Devil in Disguise
The other references to the identity and mission of the Regus Patoff (as in "Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.": Registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office) are also clear. Elvis sings: "You're the Devil in Disguise". Patoff's opponent asks the Catholic priest of a church in Los Angeles about the possibility of an exorcism. The mobile game, which is launched prematurely with bad bugs due to Patoff's machinations at the gaming developer "CompWare", has 316 levels until the reward of the "Game Over" (compare John 3 verse 16).
Whether Regus Patoff is the devil himself, Mephisto, Antichrist or a fallen angel, as speculated on the net, is rather unproductive. Horror-wise interesting instead are the unorthodox methods of the consultant from hell spread out both in the novel of the same name by Bentley Little and in the Amazon Prime film adaptation set up by Tony Basgallop and co-produced by Christoph Waltz.
Patoff, so much becomes clear here to the game developer Craig (Nat Wolff) and Elaine (Brittany O'Grady), the assistant of the "CompWare" founder Sang Woo (Brian Yoo), shot by a schoolchild in the first episode, knows nothing about the gaming industry, but is the most manipulative "people manager" in living memory. Those in the right mood might say: since Jesus.
Loyalty is the magic word. The persuasive power of this consultant, however, does not rely on the commandment of love, but on fear and greed. After the murder of the founder and the appearance of Patoff, who is provided with a devil's pact – or better: a consulting contract – "CompWare", the shuffling-hyped digital butt in which the unscrupulous people have a career in madness and the independent minds soon have to fear for their lives. And the boss gives everyone hell in the office.
Elaine is promoted, Craig investigates Patoff's work, discovers a strange alchemist, forced amputee, a Russian prosthetic company that has doubled its sales in a short time. and a robotics company that targeted Patoff. In principle and in many details, the – mostly bloodless – horror story "The Consultant" is fun. Even without an amoral superstructure, it can be seen as satire on "optimization processes" and consolidation measures in the modern world of work. Christoph Waltz, who not only plays the leading role, but also acts as an "executive producer", gives a fine performance as a sometimes smug, sometimes perfidious, sometimes amused connoisseur of the low instincts of career-polarized contemporaries.
Unfortunately, the series does not last until the end, which promises its psychohorror polished beginning. The last episode seems above all like the preparation of a possible second season. Which, however, is logical and works self-referential. In the universe of this diabolical consultant, the bottom line in the production of entertainment artifacts (games, series, music) is the hype, not the intrinsic quality. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The Consultant is available on Amazon Prime Video.