**½/****
starring Tim McInnery, Toby Stephens, Claudie Blakley, Danny Dyer
screenplay by James Moran & Christopher Smith
directed by Christopher Smith
by Ian Pugh Severance appears to have been crafted with the hope that someone out there with press credentials will use the poster-friendly quote "'The Office' meets [some horror film]," and, in order to guarantee that possibility, it mashes together about eight different subgenres of horror to simmer with the dry British humour. As we begin, David Brent manqué Richard (Tim McInnery) leads his merry band of office drones into the woods for a teamwork seminar in Bulgaria; they share a little bickering dialogue before taking a wrong turn into the domain of some Soviet war criminals who bear a grudge against their company, an international weapons developer. Each of the feral boogeymen has a specialized method of dispatching his quarry: there's the one with the machete and Jason Voorhees's steady gait; there's the one who captures his prey for some Hostel-style torture-chamber antics; and there's the would-be rapist destined to receive a violent comeuppance. As the film toggles between various familiar scenarios, it never decides if it wants to be cutely post-modern, unabashedly derivative, or both–it isn't unreasonable to wonder whether treating traditional horror shocks with dry indifference can even be considered an attempt at subversion anymore. Thrown in for good measure are lame jokes about drugs and elevator Muzak, as well as a few allusions to Dr. Strangelove performed with the arbitrariness of an untalented, Kubrick-obsessed film student. Still, the movie manages to hit the occasional bullseye whenever it filters its cinematic knowledge through a cleverer form of c'est la vie sarcasm, resulting in a few indelible concepts (a decapitated head smiling with vindication; a beautifully inappropriate closing line) so hilarious that their individual contexts are best left for viewers to discover on their own.
