Severance (18)

A nice pair of bosomy blonde Slavs are forced to lash their capacious bras together to escape from a pit, while their luckless male companion is dangled upside-down and disembowelled, blood splashing and spattering down over his agonised face, fizzing up his nose, flooding his howling mouth – all to the cutesy-kook strains of ’60s skag-love anthem ‘Itchycoo Park’...

“It’s a fackin’ good in, innit?” explains Mr Danny Dyer, on the lively, sweary yak-track. “I find that’s always a winner, starting off with a couple of prostitutes...” Elsewhere, Danny has a great British grumble about missing his home comforts (“I fackin’ hated filming in Hungary. Too fackin’ hot. I like the rain and me Sunday roast. I had a much better time in the Isle Of Man when it was pissing down”).

And here he is, in featurette Being Danny Dyer, gutted that his favourite swear-word (rhymes with runt) is being bleeped out of the DVD for the sake of a pesky 15 rating (“Fack me! I’ve just been battered and bloody and now I’m surrounded by tits and bleep!”).

Anyway. The film...

Severance is a barbed and delirious satire of office politics in a comedy hat with a horror tash. It’s darker than Shaun Of The Dead, lighter than The Descent or Deliverance, and those ‘The Office – With Trees!’ poster-quotes are only halfway there.

The Office was a subtle and nuanced character study; Severance is about as subtle and nuanced as a breezeblock baguette. But with liberal splats of gutsy, grubby-black humour, it somehow adds up to more than the sum of its lopped and sheared and gunshot-smashed parts.

By forcing a gaggle of weapons-company middle-managers to work together or die horribly, Smith skewers the phoney Darwinism of the open-plan 9 to 5; all that seething resentment, impassive aggression and carefully disguised incompetence kneaded into a tiny little tinderbox and marooned in the Hungarian wilderness.

He has the most fun muddling the slasher-movie second-guessing game. The suck-ups and ego-strokers rise fast and shout loudest, but fall and fail hardest; an isolated rank-puller tiptoes in the dark to the sound of a stalling flamethrower and the puffed and plausible lame-duck boss is found out by his failure to pass that most terrifying test: making a decision... No prize for guessing who ends up the unlikely fackin’ hero, though.

Writer James Moran conceived it all after a bad day at the office. “I came home one day, after being demotivated at work and pushed around by commuters,” he says in doc The Genesis Of Severance. “I just wanted to get my revenge and write something where I killed them all: the hapless manager, the skiver, the cheery guy who insists everything is a ‘learning experience’... They’re all there – a mix of the awful people I’ve worked with over the years.”

Smith himself had to contend with fumbling colleagues on-set. In Not-So Special Effects, he rants off a few horror-tales about the Hungarian FX goons who brought him rusty retractable machetes, jam-prone machine-guns with only handfuls of bullets and, best, a real rock with a bit of make-up on when he asked for a fake rock (for a bludgeoning scene). “This is supposed to be an orgy of violence!” he complains. “It’s more like a wank!”

There is a sly point to it all (personal responsibility, commercial ethics...). But Severance shines over preachy splattershows like Hostel by striking so squarely and unpretentiously at both jugular and funny-bone. And nervous laughter is biologically hardwired to feel good. We know. We read it in the Science Museum.

So, Jade’s PA meets Southern Comfort? Dragon’s Den remixed by Rambo on ketamine? Nah. Just papercut-sharp performances, comical comedy, horrific horror and, surely, two magnificent movie firsts (catastrophic coach jacknife, rectal stabbing).

There y’go. Knife up the arse. Fackin’ good out...

DVD Extras:

Cast/director commentary
Deleted scenes documentary
Making Of Four featurettes
Blooper reel

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