Severance (2006)

The European sales division of a weapons manufacturer decamps to a Hungarian spa lodge for a team-building weekend, and the film's satirical instincts are aimed squarely at corporate ritual: the trust exercises, the passive-aggressive memos, the boss who arrives late with two escorts and a prototype missile launcher. This is a comedy of office manners with a machete in it. The critique of the arms trade and the people who sell it lands as texture, a sour joke running underneath the carnage, and it never hardens into a thesis. The film is content to let a land mine do the moralizing.

Representationally, the ensemble is a standard British and Canadian mix, with Babou Ceesay's Billy present as one of the group and never asked to signify anything about his race. The film does not raise the subject, and neither does he. Laura Harris's Maggie survives, kills a man with a rock after he attempts to assault her, and handles herself with competence throughout, though the mechanics are those of the final girl, a role with a longer pedigree than any contemporary sensibility. The film has no interest in the interiority of identity, in ecology, in the body as a political site, or in rewriting the past. It is a slasher in the woods, and it knows it.

What the film lacks in sermonizing it makes up for in efficiency. Nobody pauses to explain the correct politics of corporate complicity, and the satire stays where satire works best, in behavior and in the smug, doomed face of Tim McInnerny's Richard. We get a lean, mean, faintly misanthropic entertainment, made by people who understood that a horror comedy does not need a lesson plan. A sober vintage, this one, and mercifully free of the lecture.