REVIEW SEVERANCE

REVIEW: SEVERANCE

This British horror film starts off as a pretty bog-standard slasher/survival-type movie and pretty much stays there.

Yes, the characters are the usual clichéd bunch. Yes, the situation is pretty unimaginative and somewhat poorly explained. Yes, you can see who’s going to survive and who’s going to die within moments of meeting the characters. We all know that the token American will be the hero because that’s the only way an American audience will ever even think of watching any film not made there and starring the same people they’ve seen in the last fifteen moovees they saw. Yes, it’s trying to cash in on the likes of Dog Soldiers and Descent (Not, as other reviews & even its own trailers will tell you, Shaun of the Dead. This is not a spoof.) And, yes, I do realise that this is shaping up to be a negative review.

It’s not, though, and the film’s far from bog-standard.

Because full of clichés though this film is it uses them very effectively, turns quite a few of them on their heads and is a great, fun-filled, thrill-ride. Too many survival films either take themselves too seriously or try to be funny and don’t manage it. This sends itself up as it goes along and does it well from the characters spinning tall tales and recounting urban myths about why all this might be about to happen down to the kind of Babes with Guns-type sequence members of the NRA are so fond of. The performances are excellent, especially Tim McInnery who turns in his usual, but wonderful, chinless-wonder character. The script is fairly tight, though it could be a little quicker to the point and clearer over which urban myth is right. The effort to make all of them at least partly true is quite clever but does add to the confusion a little. Then again, when you’re lost in a forest in Eastern Europe and someone’s killing your friends in gruesome and imaginatively cruel ways the odds are rather long on your having or caring about a complete grasp of their motives and, since they’re not Bond villains, and you don’t speak even a word of their language, anyway, explanations aren’t likely to be forthcoming, either. Put rather more bluntly, though, this kind of film doesn’t need a whole lot of plot just something to hang it on that’s remotely plausible then you get on with the action.

Once it starts it’s relentless. The body-count is pretty high, the deaths are satisfyingly gruesome and there’s no indestructible Jason/Freddy/Michael Myers type villain. The violence is pretty realistic, too. There’s none of moviedom’s usual nonsense about people not feeling pain or fear or making altruistic gestures just because they’re the good guys. With their lives on the line the worst comes out in just about everyone.

Cock-ups to watch out for: the most ineptly hidden blood-bag in history on the first victim. It’s not even needed as it’s opened out of shot. Wondering why a CEO who’s been ‘…dying to demonstrate this.’ BFG doesn’t know what it’s going to do. (It gives one of the best laughs in the film, though, so I’ll forgive them.)

Well worth a viewing with some great scares and some genuinely creepy moments. Highly recommended.