Silo, review: Apple TV+'s dystopia feels grimly claustrophobic
Silo. The word has taken on a pronounced new meaning in recent times. Originally used to describe a vast cylindrical container, it now moonlights as a metaphor denoting an enclosed worldview. Interestingly, it’s both at once in the new sci-fi saga Silo (Apple TV+).
The titular silo really is a big concrete cylinder where the last remnants of the human race now reside. Set designers and CGI boffins have done the work and we find ourselves in a full-bore world – a vast concrete shaft plunging up and down almost as far as the eye can see.
But this silo is also a dystopia that doesn’t admit of dissent. The thing that no one is allowed to say is they want to go outside to the Passchendaele-like wasteland that’s projected everywhere on window-like screens. It’s littered with the bodies of the expelled. Two characters express that wish in an arresting first episode – a freedom-fighting woman (Rashida Jones) and then her law-keeping husband (David Oyelowo) – only to pay the highest price for their individualism.
Thus the plot is triggered, the familiar one of a society that controls its population, suppresses truths about its past and punishes those seeking to disinter them. The struggle is embodied in the character of Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), a grease-stained engineer who is galvanised by the death of her activist boyfriend.
Originally self-published as a novella sequence by Hugh Howey, Silo has fallen blandly into the hands of Speed scriptwriter Graham Yost. A sprinkling of British actors doing American accents – Harriet Walter, Sophie Thompson, Geraldine James and, later on, Iain Glen – makes this grim grey otherwhere feel weirdly like home.
It’s asking a lot to commit to 10 episodes of anything. Perhaps, having paid for the silo, the producers wanted their money’s worth. But even as the characters clamber into its vaults, the sense of claustrophobia grows ever so stifling. By the end of the two launch episodes you may hanker to see the outside too. That pleasure is deferred until the finale, titled Outside. It may prove too long a wait.
