Severance, or Never Trust Management

Combine The Office with any good vengeful-killer slasher movie and you've got Severance. You'll want to like both parents to sit comfortably with their offspring. But if you do, you've got a treat in store.

Folks who'd seen Severance at the Toronto(?) film festival called it the most interesting, buzz-inducing movie of the festival. I'd read, I responded, that it was a rollicking parody of a corporate retreat gone wrong. No, it's a bloody slasher. Well, we're both right.

Severance is winking at the genre while making a clever, but by the numbers, slasher. The scrim of corporate venality and teamwork claptrap is delightful, but in fact, a distraction from the main story. I know, that's the po-mo, 21st century way and I'm on board with it. I laughed, I was horrified, I was scared. And some of the most hackneyed character moments were neatly subverted by playing on the bumbling shortcomings of this team of weapons marketers.

The best one of these came at the moment when, driven back to the lodge with a mortally wounded go-getter, the pretty blond and the good-looking stoner, Steve (yeah, the unlikely romance at the center of the story) pause and reflect on the current danger. Steve confesses that he's not a very good guy. Then - head slap - he remembers that he's left Go-Getter's severed in the frig. inside the van that crashed a half mile down the road. That's high quality comedy. It lifted the cliche to a new level by winning a laugh while simultaneously proving his confession.

The slasher movie within is real, including all the beats and set-ups you expect: unlikely group in unfamiliar territory; unwelcome conditions; rage-driven furies to pursue them; characters - movie meat - cut down for their predominating flaws; pursuits; flight; entrapment; characters split off as targets; lovers prevail; guilty are punished; evil vanquished by unlikely agents, or in this case, angels (think Victoria Secret, not Renaissance painting).

But the biggest challenge while watching lay in not knowing whether to trust the director and screenwriter. Good storytelling throws us off guard to delight and surprise us. By distracting us from danger by mocking easy corporate stereotypes the filmmakers also showed that they lacked interest in the people who live withing those types and the themes this story might embody. Animating the otherwise clever plot, like many offerings in the genre, nearly every character was two-dimensional.

Perhaps the director and screenwriter pointing out the bankruptcy of the genre. "You're here for the adrenaline," they seem to be saying in effect, "Not for our take on characters who embody the murderous emotions and anxious fear that we sense all around us so, what the hell, let's have a go at self-important managers." But we all know that managers are more dangerous than that. Corporations are more dangerous than that. Think of the rage to which they've driven you.