If you liked Severance

After a painful breakup, a man pays to have every memory of his ex erased, then changes his mind halfway through the procedure.

Eternal Sunshine asks the same question as Severance, whether a procedure can really remove part of you, and answers it with heartbreak. Charlie Kaufman's script also shares Severance's dry sense of humor about the clinical companies that sell these procedures.

The timeline jumps around, and it can take a little while to find your footing.

A low-level clerk in a nightmarish bureaucracy tries to fix a clerical error that got the wrong man arrested, and falls in love along the way.

Brazil is the ancestor of every surreal office in film, and you can see its pipes, forms and absurd rules in Lumon. It is far more chaotic and comic than Severance, with flights of fantasy that only Terry Gilliam would attempt.

Its ending is bleak, and several cuts exist. Look for the director's version.

A secret agent resigns, is kidnapped and wakes up in a pleasant seaside Village where everyone has a number and nobody will tell him why.

The Prisoner is the original mystery-box show about a man fighting a polite, smiling institution. Its cheerful village and its strange rules are the closest thing on TV to Lumon's wellness sessions and waffle parties. Each episode is a new attempt to escape or understand.

It is a 1960s production, with that era's pacing and effects, and its final episode is famously divisive.

Stanley, employee 427, notices one day that all his coworkers have vanished, while a narrator tells him exactly where to go next.

The Stanley Parable is the funniest thing on this list and the most direct cousin of Severance's office. It is a game about choice, obedience and the stories companies tell their workers, and disobeying the narrator is half the fun.

Short and best played in many small runs. The Ultra Deluxe edition adds a lot of new material.

A woman searching for her brother walks into the headquarters of a secret government agency and finds it overtaken by something that bends the building itself.

Control's brutalist offices, memos and redacted documents make it the most Severance-like place you can explore. Its mystery is told through files and odd rules nobody fully explains, exactly the kind of world-building that feeds fan theories.

It is an action game with a lot of combat, and some fights are hard.

A woman looks back on her years at an English boarding school and slowly lets the reader understand what the school was really for.

Never Let Me Go shares Severance's slow reveal of what an institution has done to its people, and its quiet, almost polite horror. Ishiguro shows how people accept the rules they grew up with, which is what Severance's innies do every day.

It is a sad book with little suspense. Avoid spoilers about the premise.

07 / Anime · 1998

Serial Experiments Lain

Matches: Memory and identity

A shy teenage girl gets her first computer and is drawn into the Wired, where a version of her she does not recognize already exists.

Lain asks Severance's question about identity, whether you are the person in front of you or the one other people remember, and asks it through technology. Its humming power lines and eerie silence create the same unease as Lumon's empty corridors.

Deliberately confusing, and it does not explain itself. Don't expect to solve it on a first watch.