Severance
Studio: Magnolia
WorkNameSort: Severance
The global war on terror serves as the peripheral pretext for Severance, about a group of seven bickering employees for a defense contractor who are sent into an unnamed forest in Eastern Europe for a morale-boosting company retreat. It’s here they find a group of motiveless masked marauders planning to slaughter the weapons peddlers with their own medicine. Shaun of the Dead may have made it look effortless, but finding the right balance between horror and humor requires a deft touch. Look at the general failures of recent comedy-horror hybrids The Tripper and Behind the Mask, for instance. But this nifty British genre mash-up keeps your interest throughout, fusing social commentary with some ingeniously designed scares. As the Genesis of Severance featurette explains, the movie was pitched as “The Office meets Deliverance.” Though it’s neither as clever nor as harrowing as those respective landmarks, Severance has enough elements of awkward corporate-relations yuks and frightening plunges into inescapable terror to sate fans of both.
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2007.