'Silo' review: Terrific world-building on a cursed Earth

'You've got to hand it to a show that can make turning a lever a hugely suspenseful moment.' Photos: Handouot

Silos – you can't work in 'em, or so the management gurus tell us; and you can't maintain peace through mutually assured destruction without 'em, or so the fellers with the nukes tell us.

Well, someone (or several thousand someones) didn't listen. By the time dystopian sci-fi drama Silo begins, we're several human generations on from said mutually assured destruction.

What is (supposedly) left of humanity has been crammed into a self-contained underground facility where the denizens live out a compartmentalised existence in what is essentially a giant sealed compartment.

They are told that leaving it means certain death but that doesn't stop the occasional rebel/questioner from declaring a desire to head for the wasteland outside. It's a notion so ghastly and socially abhorrent that there's no taking it back once the words are uttered, and the speaker is exiled to "certain" doom.

Based on the prose series by US author Hugh Howey (who self-published the early instalments on Amazon's Kindle Direct ebook platform), Silo the streaming show is brought to us by Graham Yost, screenwriter of such breakneck thrillers as Speed and Broken Arrow.

It's an abrupt change of pace from those two as Silo's first season methodically, deliberately builds its world and teases its mysteries without offering much of a glimpse at any answers so far (four episodes out of 10 in its debut season).

'And if I'm elected, I promise to... be here again, next election.'

In keeping with Howey's stories, the show's point of view shifts abruptly within the early instalments, putting the viewer a little off-balance, although not that disoriented that we can't pick up on the allegory.

Are we supposed get behind Sheriff Holston Becker (David Oyelowo), haunted by a loss that unfolds in flashback in the opener? Or long-serving Mayor Ruth Jahns (Geraldine James), in her efforts to maintain the people's fragile grip on... everything? Or maybe engineer Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson), literally a "low-level" inhabitant but whose knack for all things mechanical keeps the lights (and air filters) on?

Heck, I'm not telling – go get your bearings shaken up like I did.

One character who IS turning out to be something of a constant, unfortunately (though it says a lot about the actor), is Tim Robbins' rigid, suspicious-and-disdainful-of-everyone IT Department head Bernard Holland.

Suppressing a shiver whenever Bernard shares a scene with a (more sympathetic) character, I couldn't help but wonder if the human-imitating superbugs of Mimic had finally evolved to perfecting their, uh, mimicry. Yep, he's that unnerving.

'Life in the Before was complicated. People wore different faces. The man you knew as Jack Reacher, I knew as Ethan Hunt.'

Beyond the visible struggles of its characters, Silo hints that a lot of the truth – about history, the state of the world, the reason why they are all in there to begin with – is being zealously withheld from the people (who may suspect that things are not quite right but just buy into it for the sake of not upsetting the apple cart).

That should get the old conspiracy-loving juices flowing, and by the third episode you may be totally convinced that the wool is being pulled over nearly everyone's eyes.

While the post-apocalyptic and dystopian future genres are so well-worn that much of this will seem familiar by now, the craftsmanship in every aspect is what gives this an edge in a crowded field.

The world-building is meticulous and the cast top-notch, though the pace could have hurried along a little, particularly in the fourth episode which (for the most part) seems too laid-back and almost filler-like considering the fingernail-gnawing suspense of the previous one.

But there's nothing like a good cliffhanger to keep the viewer hooked, and Silo is good at getting us sufficiently invested in its numerous characters to care about what happens to them after well-timed moments of great peril (just to prepare you, a fair bit of it is unpleasant).

And we haven't even seen much of the mysterious Judicial, the governing arm of this totalitarian regime, beyond its enigmatic enforcer Sims (Common), as of yet.

That even this sinister individual gets a humanising moment says a lot about the author and the showrunner's efforts to make this as well-rounded a drama as can be. Not a silo mentality, for sure.

New episodes of Silo arrive on Apple TV+ every Friday.