Spoiler-Free Review: Severance (2006)
IMDb Logline: During a team-building retreat in the mountains, a group of sales representatives are hunted down one by one.
Genre: Horror, Comedy
Recommendation: Watch it if you’re a fan of British Humo(u)r.
What is British Humo(u)r? I don’t really know. But it feels like the kind that tickles your insides in the cutest way possible, encouraging chuckles and chortles through even the most gruesome and graphic murders.
I’ve never been to a team-building retreat in my life, and neither would I want to. And I really wouldn’t want to be part of a retreat if my office was in the business of military arms dealing. We’re helping people kill other people. How likely is it that we can truly get along with one another?
Severance pulls together the European Sales division of Palisade Defence in the secluded forests of Hungary, led by an inept manager and an oddball bunch of employees that includes a psychedelics enthusiast. It’s hard to believe that this group may be indirectly linked to numerous global atrocities through their sales acumen.
Either way, our sales team gets hounded by someone channeling the spirit of Jason Voorhees, but this individual exhibits far more ingenuity and cruelty with their methods of murder. Severance is funny in the aforementioned British ways, for its clever foreshadowing of certain deaths, its refreshing choices on whom to dispatch to the afterlife, and its off-kilter handling of certain B-movie tropes.
Perhaps viewers more attuned to British horror-comedy would have seen things coming, but as a neophyte myself, I was pleasantly surprised by the events that unfolded.
OTHER NOTABLE SEVERANCE MOVIE REVIEWS
Nakul:
The Office meets Friday the 13th. A fun horror comedy that covers an admirable amount of genre-friendly ground before winding up with a funny & nasty third act.
Painkiller Jaime:
The Office goes to Camp Crystal Lake.
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