A team-building weekend in Eastern Europe goes badly wrong for the employees of a weapons company.
"Severance" is a British comedy-horror hybrid, from director Christopher Smith, is a pleasing mixture of survival horror and British comedy. Think "Deliverance", "Hills Have Eyes" and more recently (and more British) "Dog Soldiers", but with the protagonists replaced with recognisable and endearingly crap English office workers on a team building exercise in Hungary (including Danny Dyer, whom I still have a liking for, perhaps from too many viewings of "Human Traffic" as a teenager). It"s not exactly "The Office meets Deliverance" as the taglines stated, but the film is an entertaining enough spin on a well-worn genre.
However, there is a niggling constant in this film that I could just not shake off, and something that most reviews seem to have curiously ignored. Not too give too much of the plot away, but it turns that the area in which the hapless Brits (and one American) find themselves appears to be an area where Eastern European, possibly Russian, war criminals are still in hiding in the forests, homicidal and out for blood. This quasi-political edge to the film is badly handled, poorly explained and feeds into lazy fears about people from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, exploiting them to, presumably, up the terror for the popcorn audiences.
Not for one second will I attempt to deny that atrocities did occur in the area in the last twenty years, as it is public knowledge that such things have occurred in Eastern Europe. Where exactly? When? Why? We"re not sure. According to Christopher Smith, it doesn"t matter, as long as he can utilise the imposing figure of a balaclava wearing, rifle toting maniacal soldier speaking threateningly in an Eastern European language. What country is this film set in? Hungary, it is implied at the beginning of the film, but we are never sure. Who are these guys with the guns and balaclava"s? War criminals. Right. What war? What country are they from? What language are they speaking? Why are they killing people anyway? None of these questions are answered, as in the logic of the film it doesn"t matter. They are bad. That"s it.
Forgive me if I read too much into this, but it is curious that a film that focuses on Eastern Europe as source of horror directed against the British comes at a time when Hungary, Estonia, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland became members of the EU in 2004, followed by Romania and Hungary in 2007. The panic over the waves of immigration that followed, in my view, is exploited unashamedly in "Severance", perpetuating a stereotype that is, at worst, downright offensive and at best, lazy and xenophobic.
And what to make of the sections featuring the two near-naked, mud covered "Balkan Babes" that our everyman Brit, Danny Dyer, leers at "FHM" style? Smutty and infantile, if I"m being kind. Give me "Dog Soldiers" any day, a film that was funny, was gory and didn"t play off Joe Everyman"s tabloid bred fear of Eastern European men taking "our" jobs, and the lads-mag fantasy of Eastern European women taking off their clothes.
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Suspenseful comedy thriller. Palisade Defense is a company that truly cares about its employees. When the company's European sales division exceeds expectations, the president decides that his dedicated employees deserve a relaxing, corporate team-building retreat. The trip takes a turn for the worst, however, when a deadly enemy infiltrates the retreat with the singular goal of ensuring that no one gets out alive.
Seven colleagues from Palisade Defence embark on a team-building weekend away in Hungary only to find their holiday being sabotaged by a mysterious enemy.
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