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Rated R
Directed by Christopher Smith
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens
“The best way to criticize a film is to make another film.”
-Jean-Luc Godard
There is a very thin, yet fundamentally polar line between “parody” and “satire.” Both involve various forms of sly mockery, but the difference is night and day.
Edgar Wright’s SHAUN OF THE DEAD is a parody of horror films because it comes from a place of love. It hits every plot point of the Zombie subgenre with such wonderful and humorous affection. Wright and his group no doubt devoured Romero and all that he has wrought with a giddy zeal and fanboy tenderness, thinking all the while; “I wanna make one of THOSE!” It shows by how funny, and yet how gentle it is.
And then there’s Christopher Smith’s SEVERANCE. This comes from a place of deep anger. I don’t think Smith hates horror films per se, but I DO think he hates what they’ve become on the last couple of years. They’ve become all sizzle and no steak, packing the gross on top of the uncomfortable while skimping on stuff like character development, worthwhile dialogue and y’know, actual SCARY stuff. And Smith did look upon all this, the Eli Roths and the Greg McLeans and the David DeFalcos and told ALL of them to go fuck themselves.
Part comedy, part slasher flick, part pissed-off call to arms, SEVERANCE… Is satire.
Seven office underlings for a global military defense firm go on a “team-building” retreat in the woods of Hungary to go paintballing (the last resort of the desperate boss) and learn how to work together. They will learn this all too well when they find they are being stalked by a mad slasher in the middle of the woods of a country whose language is unknown to them.
SEVERENCE sets its comedic roots from the get-go when, not five minutes in a man fleeing from the killer runs straight into a tree, and the camera does the Wile E. Coyote thing where it keeps going and then backtracks to see where the guy went.
There is no cliche or staple of the slasher genre that goes unskewered or unplayed in SEVERANCE. Everything from “I’ll be right back!” to the spider on a girl’s shirt for a cheap scream to tripping at the wrong moment is dealt a thorough beating. Even the usual cast of nubile and studly teenagers we find in slasher movies are replaced by pasty English people in their thirties. The players of SEVERANCE include an ex Bond Villain (Toby Stephens) and the blonde girl from THE FACULTY (Laura Harris, whom I didn’t know was ACTUALLY English).
If SEVERANCE was all genre-mocking and chop-busting, it’d be a funny enough little trifle, but nothing permanent. But where this film gets the gold is that it doesn’t really reach for the laughs it gets. It shows its characters as people and not as obligatory archetypes or sacred cows led to slaughter. People are inherently funny. It’s the way they get into things and how they try to get out, all the while digging in deeper. How they handle stress, wants and all that. It’s human nature that that makes SEVERANCE funny.
Fortunately, this is what also makes it scary.
Because we’ve seen them make complete asses out of themselves, we like them. Because we like them, our pulses set to racing when they are being preyed upon. See how that works? See also how NO OTHER HORROR MOVIE IS DOING THAT RIGHT NOW?
But it is a testament to the sheer, deft talent of writers Smith and James Moran that with all SEVERANCE has on its plate, it doesn’t neglect anything, nor does it shut down the horror to make way for the laughs or vice-versa. There is about a one minute stretch in the middle where I went from laughter, to shock, to revulsion, BACK to laughs again, then all-encompassing dread. It’s all organic. There are no deep gouges in tone. It flows beautifully.
To see SEVERANCE is to know fully and with the grimness of a meat-hook just how fucking lazy horror films are right now. One need only watch four or five movies like HOSTEL or WOLF CREEK to know how to undermine and subvert the genre to make it do new tricks or at the VERY LEAST break the monotony. But no one does this. It’s like few people working in horror have ever even seen a Goddamn horror movie before and they fall into the same ruts and the same traps as their forebears like greedy lemmings. It has even, I daresay, gotten to the point that any member of the audience could write a better film than what they are paying an upwards of eight bucks to go see.
Well, Christopher Smith HAS seen a horror movie. Too many, I’d wager, and now the boredom has led to the kind of anger only artistic impression can soothe.
He’d make a damn fine critic.
4 out of 4
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