I daresay that anyone who’s ever worked in an office building – certainly any horror fan, at least – has idly fantasised about what might happen if, somehow, shit went south in that environment. It’s something I myself have imagined in years gone by, in my short story Paperwork (plug time: you can read that here). More recently, and a lot more prominently, writer-producer James Gunn and director Greg McLean explored that territory in The Belko Experiment – which, perhaps unfortunately, landed a wide release at roughly the same time that Mayhem, the latest film from director Joe Lynch, premiered at SXSW 2017. It’s always a bit tricky when two films based around very a similar premise arrive more or less back to back, and given that Lynch is a considerably smaller fish in the Hollywood pond than Gunn, Mayhem might easily have seemed doomed to be washed away in The Belko Experiment’s wake. However, if overall fan reaction is anything to go by, I don’t think the Mayhem crew has anything to worry about. The Belko Experiment is pretty entertaining (although played a lot straighter than I had anticipated, given Gunn’s pedigree), but Mayhem is an altogether more frenetic affair which takes a more outrageous, darkly humourous turn, and proves a lot more fun in so doing.
Steven Yeun is Derek, and – as an inventive elevator montage explains to us early on – not so long ago he was an ambitious, principled young law graduate hoping to make a real difference in the world. However, after several years of working for an elephantine law firm, almost all of this has been beaten of him by the harsh realities of his profession. Indeed, Derek has had a role to play in furthering his company’s unscrupulous ways, having successfully saved a client from a first-degree murder charge on the grounds that the man had no culpability for his own actions, having become infected with what has become known as the red-eye virus: a temporary condition which is not lethal, but strips away the inhibitions and social conditioning of the infected, causing them to act on their basest impulses, most notably bloodthirsty rage. (And, obviously, it leaves the infected red-eyed.)
Then one fateful morning, shortly after dismissing the pleas of soon-to-be homeless client Melanie (Samara Weaving), Derek discovers that the higher-ups in the firm are using him as a scapegoat for a case that someone else screwed up. Denied the chance to argue his side, Derek finds himself unceremoniously fired; but before he gets the chance to leave the building, the doors are sealed and SWAT teams are positioned outside, because – wouldn’t you know it – the red-eye virus has somehow broken out inside, leaving all those in the building trapped under a strictly enforced 8 hour quarantine. Soon enough, Derek and Melanie find themselves unwittingly reunited, and realise that the following 8 hours might just give them the time they need to get up to the top of the building, strictly off-limits to all lesser employees, and convince the board to both save Derek’s job and Melanie’s home. And given that, like everyone else in the building, Derek and Melanie are in the grip of the virus, they’re not going to have too many qualms about just how they make it up there.
While I don’t want to make this review nothing but a compare/contrast with The Belko Experiment, I’ll say this: where Belko was essentially Battle Royale in a corporate office building, Mayhem is more akin to The Raid and/or Dredd (another of those unfortunately similar set-up scenarios), in that it centres on two specific characters trapped in a building, fighting their way up to the big boss at the top. Mayhem also stands apart in that it plays much more with office politics, as the virus allows for old rivalries and resentments to come to the surface in an excessive fashion. This is part of what genre films, I feel, are really for: presenting anxieties we can relate to directly, then showing them dealt with in a way we never could, and obviously never should, in reality. It’s easy to identify both with Yeun’s disgruntled employee and Weaving’s enraged client, both of whom have been screwed over by the powers that be and want to get their payback. The fact that they’re both endearing, funny, charismatic actors who look good beating the shit out of people is an obvious plus.
The important thing is, Mayhem remains very tongue-in-cheek with this. The rage virus angle might make it sound like a zombie/28 Days Later deal, but that’s really not the case; the infected remain articulate and retain their standard personalities, it’s just that everything gets kicked up a good few notches. This is where much of the film’s humour comes from, particularly given it’s all set in a building full of lawyers, where verbal obfuscation is always the order of the day: one amusing moment sees Yeun’s Derek spiel off an overly wordy disclaimer about how he intends to annihilate everyone in his way.
Joe Lynch has had an eventful run thus far as a director, from the distinctly above average DTV sequel Wrong Turn 2, to the troubled fantasy comedy Knights of Badassdom, to the ambitious but deeply flawed Salma Hayek action thriller Everly. Mayhem certainly isn’t without its minor issues: it smacks of trying too hard to be cool at times, and in its editing and camerawork it’s riffing on Edgar Wright a little too blatantly (a curious pattern emerging for Samara Weaving, given her other recent horror comedy, McG’s The Babysitter, was also a clear-cut Wright rip-off). Even so, it’s safe to say Mayhem is easily Lynch’s best film to date, and one which it’s easy to see becoming a repeat viewing favourite in years to come.
Mayhem is available to download in the UK from 18th June, then comes to DVD on 16th July from Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment. It will be available on Shudder in the autumn.