Silo review – this handsomely produced sci-fi drama grapples with the big questions

Rebecca Ferguson is still excellent in this unremittingly grey-green subterranean post-apocalypse. Its political acuity makes it worth watching, even if it’s not always the most entertaining …

Being trapped indefinitely in an underground bunker, post-apocalypse, would have many drawbacks, but one of the worst would be miserable boredom. How would you fill the day, and the next and the next, apart from with squabbles and gloom? It’s a problem that Silo, a plush but inevitably rather dank sci-fi drama, wears like a rusty shackle.

Hundreds of years ago, the survivors of a cataclysm were ushered into the titular silo – a dizzyingly enormous metal cylinder hundreds of storeys deep, with the top floor at ground level and everything else subterranean. Ten thousand of them live there now, the records of how and why it all started having long since mysteriously vanished. Citizens abide by rules for which there is no mandate beyond solemn tradition and a paralysing fear of the alternative: on the floor that serves as a town square there is a giant screen with a live video feed of the devastated, irradiated world outside. Employment is provided by departments with functional names such as Mining and Mechanical, giving the impression that the silo is a clanking retro contraption that could fail at any moment.
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