REVIEW OF SEVERANCE

I'm reprinting this as a reminder. If you missed Severance on its initial festival circuit here stateside it is now enjoying a US theatrical run courtesy of Landmark Theaters.

EDIT: Silly Canfield. Hey Canadians! It's on our side of the 49th Parallel too. Check your listings. Go see it. Go. Now.

As a big, big fan of Christopher Smith's Creep I was very excited to see Severance with a big group of like-minded friends (the kind that like to go “Eeeeeeeeew!”) I staked my rep. that this would be worth a treasured movie night slot. It was a good bet. Severance is by far the best horror comedy I've seen in a long while mixing equal parts Friday the 13th, Dr. Strangelove and Office Space even if it does fail to generate the sort of apocalyptic tension that makes the business of weaponry such a good subject for satire. Its main fault is in injecting an unnecessary mystery regarding the killers identity when it could have been revealed earlier and used to strengthen the “conflict” that drives the film. In other words it's not a very tight storyline. Without giving too much away I would rather have seen a group of office workers who work for a munitions manufacturer attempting to actually use their products in a frontlines situation than wonder if they are killing each other off for the first half of the film. When the identity of the killer is revealed in this film it comes as no real surprise anyway.

But, having said that, I'd still heartily recommend this marvelously inventive, very funny, and occasionally suspenseful, horror satire. A group of office workers at a munitions factory are forced by their obnoxious boss to attend a weekend team building retreat only to wind up being stalked and killed. Who is killing them and why I won't reveal but I'm betting you'll like the film for other reasons.

Severance is at it's strongest in the way it references the other great films that question our need to blow each other up. Anyone who has ever seen Bowling For Columbine will remember the image of the bikini clad girl firing the AK-47. Such jiggle-vision is actually employed here to help humanize a female character who in almost any other movie would end up spending most of her screen time providing sex comedy relief. Other moments reference Dr. Strangelove.

But Severance also offers some really original takes on horror movie tropes and comic characterization. In one scene we are offered a spider and it is put to exactly the sort of effect spiders are always put to in horror films- until the end of the scene. Another even better executed and much funnier moment involves a swimming pool, a pile of leaves and an idiot but as funny as it is it also involves a surprising amount of suspense for what would have been, in lesser hands, a quick gag.

And maybe not so surprisingly one can't help but think of The Office while watching Severance. There's a great bit where the boss inadvertently gives a romantic compliment to a surprised coworker only to dig himself a deep verbal hole trying to back peddle. And that's another thing to like about this engaging film. Its characters aren't just there to die. They have small hopes and dreams as well as a complete and utter incompetence about the use of small arms. It gives the phrase office politics a truly fresh meaning.

Ultimately Severance emerges as much more than just a forgettable horror comedy and while one could easily see it being remade well in the US I also wish the distributors had seen fit to give it a much wider US release. We're still playing catch up here in the states when it comes to producing horror movies actually worth a trek to the theater and as one country after another takes up where we left off (was it the seventies or the eighties?)