Screened as part of NZIFF 2007

Severance 2007

Directed by Christopher Smith

Brit director Christopher Smith follows Creep with this horror-comedy about a group of office workers on a team building exercise in Hungary who are hunted by unidentified backwoods maniacs.

Germany / UK In English
90 minutes 35mm

Screenplay

James Moran
,
Christopher Smith

Photography

Ed Wild

Editor

Stuart Gazzard

Music

Christian Henson

With

Danny Dyer
,
Laura Harris
,
Tim McInnerny
,
Toby Stephens
,
Claudie Blakley
,
Andy Nyman

Festivals

Locarno, Toronto 2006

Elsewhere

Brit director Christopher Smith lives up to the promise of his debut Creep with Severance, a horror-comedy that's been tantalisingly marketed as The Office meets Deliverance. But even that doesn't quite nail the offbeat, darkly comic charms of this unpredictable, audacious genre-twister, which owes just as much to the sly, self-winking humour of Shaun of the Dead and the xenophobic fear-mongering of Hostel. If you've ever been trapped 9-to-5 in a stuffy office cubicle, chances are you'll identify with the film's ragtag arms-supplying sales crew. They've been shuttled away by their boss (Blackadder's Tim McInnerny) to a remote area in Hungary for a weekend of team-building, only to be hunted by unidentified backwoods maniacs. It's here that Severance takes a turn for the outrageous, augmenting its shocks and laughs with a varied arsenal of irresponsibly applied weaponry, including bear traps, flame throwers, rocket launchers and a pair of amply bosomed, machine gun-toting Eastern European babes.