Coupures

Co-writer and director Christopher Smith puts a rather fresh and funny spin on the standard slasher formula with this irreverent horror comedy. The employees of a multinational weapons manufacturer named Palisade travel to the Eastern European woods for a "team building" retreat. They get on each others' nerves for a while, but this will not turn out to be their biggest worry. What happens is that a very stealthy and extremely sadistic killer is going to target them, and arrange for them to meet nasty ends.

Give Smith and his co-writer James Moran some credit for playing around with the conventions of slasher cinema without resorting to self-referential dialogue. The set-up is certainly a topical one, and the filmmakers do work in digs at corporate culture as well as this genre. The characters may grate on the nerves of some viewers. "Severance" does fall into that familiar trap of "dumb people doing dumb things", but at least not all of the characters are hopeless. Laura Harris plays Maggie as a resilient person who keeps a cool head in an emergency.

Genre lovers will be pleased with a respectable amount of splatter, and it must be said that these particular woods - "Severance" was filmed in Hungary and The Isle of Man - possess some decent atmosphere. The performances are generally capable. Danny Dyer is the principal supplier of comedy relief as the immature Steve. Toby Stephens is fun in the role of Harris. The filmmakers also work in a brief and very amusing way to contrive some nudity.

Ultimately, this is rather predictable and the ending isn't all that great, but this is still pretty enjoyable while it lasts.

Seven out of 10.