The Apple TV show Severance will blow your mind - aptly so, given that the show focuses on a procedure designed to bifurcate your brain - one persona for your work life, the other your home.
Co-directed by Ben Stiller and Irish director Aoife McArdle, Severance has garnered sensational reviews that focus on not just the storyline and acting but the sheer beauty of the created world and its inherent eeriness.
Adam Scott, of Parks and Recreation fame among many other hits, plays the lead in Mark Scout - a worker for the mysterious Lumon Industries.
The first season focuses on Mark's reasons for undergoing the severance procedure, as well his co-workers, who are gradually revealed to have varying backgrounds and motivations.
In a slow-burn story arc, the interweaving of the lives of the 'innies' and 'outies' takes place with astonishing clarity given the potential difficulty of effectively doing so.
With a cast including Christopher Walken, John Turturro and Patricia Arquette, there is a weight of acting that dynamises a crystal-clear script, along with videography reminiscent of the best of Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers and more than one could deign to mention.
Speaking to McArdle - a veteran of short films, music videos for U2 and Coldplay, as well as the hauntingly-beautiful Kissing Candice - it becomes clearer how co-direction with two people of artistic clarity can conjure such a world.
McArdle explained how her childhood in Omagh guided her creative path to such a big-budget show.
"In tandem with music, I was into writing and really into books. They brought me into film, I was lucky in that my parents were both into film. Dad was really into 1940s film noir and mum then showed me Taxi Driver and Paris, Texas .
"Those kind of films shaped an interest quite young. Then watching those kind of films which were super-visual, it then got me into photography. I always loved creative writing at school, then I moved away from that and got really obsessed by photography and the cinematic side of film-making.
"You use a different side of your brain for each - sometimes you are just not in the zone at all to write well, so sometimes I feel like I really have to focus in on the writing. If I'm directing then I feel like I'm more visual and [focused on] the composition of images.
"I feel like I'm constantly learning, and that's how I've approached work; that's how I have taken on projects - where there is a risk involved. When it's scary, you learn a lot."
In Stiller, McArdle would appear to have found the perfect partner - someone driven by a creative goal but who is aware of the creative skillsets available to the show through cast and crew.
Having directed the three middle episodes of the nine-part season, the onus was on McArdle to keep the fires smouldering as the strands of story weaved ever closer.
"When I read the first pilot of Severance I thought that it was conceptually so strong, I loved the themes and loved that it had this underdog, anti-capitalist story at its heart.
"I got autonomy over how I was going to put my episodes together on Severance, I got to add a lot of my ideas. Ben is really generous in that sense, he's collaborative and wanted to really push the creative limits and make it as stand-out as possible.
"He gave me a lot of room to add ideas to the episodes and the scripts, in particular visually, I got a lot of space.
"In terms of the crew, they were already in place and had one crew between us, so in that sense it was different. But everyone brought something to the table."
As for the cast, going from smaller budget arthouse projects to a global TV hit held little concern for someone confident in their creative abilities - but McArdle admits aspects of production were in some way as surreal as the Covid environment in which it was filmed.
Christopher Walken and John Turturro play out one of the romances in the depths of the Lumon world, and McArdle felt the importance of striking the right creative tone.
"I was huge fans of both of their work, they have been in some of my favourite films ever.
"It was daunting but amazing, I love the fact that I got to work on this romantic storyline with them, it felt really fresh and I loved how people really connected with it.
"They really embraced it because they were already good friends in real life, which gave the whole thing real emotional potency. It was really fun trying to work on what those sequences could be, keeping it subtle, romantic and timeless.
"But they are so talented that you do have to sometimes pinch yourself when you're behind the monitor watching them do their thing."
With the three episodes that McArdle directed solely, the impetus was to keep the audience engaged to the extent that they were champing at the bit for the dramatic crescendo of the final third.
"I was hyper-aware of that aspect because Ben was doing the first and last three. We talked about keeping that section as a bit of a rabbit-hole but you have to keep that momentum up and make sure you're answering some of the questions.
"You have to start enriching the characters to get to know them better, understanding them more as human beings, otherwise you're not going to keep on until the end.
"We wanted to take the risk of the first episodes being a slow build, relying on the fact that people want something that get their brain going; that there are enough people out there who want to slowly get to know characters.
"We were surprised and happy that people were happy to go down that rabbit-hole and see it through to the end."
With a background that has spanned writing, production, cinematography and now directing, McArdle says she flits back and forth between skillsets depending on the project at hand.
"These days I'm much more into story-telling; I've gone back around to enjoying that. As a teenager, I was always into writers and story-telling and the ones that were more experimental.
"Ultimately, you can't beat a really good character-led or underdog story so I've come back to a love of that in the stuff I've been writing.
"Sometimes if you have particular interests, you feel like you have to write your own work because you feel that you've got something in your head that you want to make, so finding the script that fits your approach is not always easy.
"That's why I really loved Severance because I felt like it spoke to my interests in a unique way."
McArdle says she may not be involved in season two of the show as she tends more towards 'authoring' the world in which the drama takes place.
She is working on two film projects of her own, and after the creative success of Severance then they be still more feathers in the cap of Irish creativity.
