Film
Mayhem
A gleeful office-set rampage film where a virus strips away inhibition and professionalism, turning cubicle drones into their unfiltered worst selves. It's a snappy, blood-soaked satire that finds real comedy in workplace resentment while delivering exactly what its premise promises. Pitch-black fun for anyone who's fantasized about burning bridges.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you like workplace satire that gets properly bloody, where jokes about cubicle misery and gore arrive in the same breath and neither one lets up for long.
Skip it if the tone is scrappy and the budget shows in places, and the comedy leans on broad, repeated gags that can wear thin over its brisk running time.
What it asks of you: Short and fast, under ninety minutes, with little breathing room: it wants you to keep pace and laugh at the carnage without time to settle into any one character.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
Falling Down1993
Michael Douglas as an ordinary man having an extraordinary bad day, methodically working through LA. It's the template for the urban descent narrative, and it's tense, furious, and darkly funny in ways that still sting.
But The 90s sensibility shows. Some of the satire lands softly, and at 115 minutes it overstays its thesis.

The Belko Experiment2017
Office workers forced to eliminate each other in an enclosed space. It mines corporate hierarchy and desperation for genuine horror and darkly comic gold, with practical effects and real stakes that keep you off-balance.
But The pacing sags in act two, and it commits to bleakness in ways that leave you feeling more hollow than cathartic.

Severance2022
A corporation surgically splits workers' memories between office and personal life. It's a high-concept office nightmare that grows more unsettling as its layers peel back, gorgeously shot and genuinely strange.
But It's deliberately slow-burn and cerebral. If you want immediate action and resolution, this will frustrate you.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Mayhem
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Invisible Man2020
Both use genre mechanics to literalize workplace/domestic power dynamics—Mayhem's virus doing externally what Invisible Man explores internally, both finding dark comedy in the loss of social restraint.
A woman terrorized by her abusive ex who has found a way to become invisible. It reframes invisibility as a metaphor for gaslighting and erasure, turning science fiction into intimate horror. Modern, furious, and genuinely unsettling.
But It's a slow-burn thriller more interested in dread than action. The politics are direct and unapologetic, which some find preachy rather than compelling.

More like this (8)
Office Space1999
Three tech workers sabotage their own company in the ultimate anti-corporate comedy. It's quotable, sharp, and somehow got more accurate about workplace absurdity in the decades since it came out.
But It's gentler than Mayhem—closer to satirical observation than cathartic destruction. The tone is very of its time.

They Live1988
A man finds sunglasses that reveal hidden messages commanding compliance and obedience. Carpenter's deadpan alien-invasion-as-capitalism allegory is weird, funny, brutal, and endlessly rewatchable.
But The plot is thin and the effects are dated. It works as vibe and mood, not narrative momentum.

Battle Royale2000
A class of Japanese schoolchildren are forced to fight to the death on an island. It's the spiritual ancestor of all elimination films, visceral and darkly comic, with genuine character moments between the carnage.
But It's in Japanese with subtitles, very violent, and the morality is deliberately murky. Some sequences don't age well by modern sensibilities.

Assault on Precinct 131976
A police precinct under siege from a relentless gang. Carpenter's genre masterpiece—lean, efficient, nail-tight tension that proves less is more when you know how to control a space.
But The pacing is glacial by modern standards, and the plot is deliberately skeletal. It's about mood and mechanics, not character depth.

The Purge2013
For one night, crime is legal. It's a high-concept premise about class violence and social control that uses home-invasion tension to explore what we'd actually do without law. Surprisingly ambitious.
But The execution doesn't match the premise. It becomes a standard thriller that wastes its own idea, and the sequels sink further.

Deep Blue Sea1999
Genetically enhanced sharks hunt researchers in an underwater facility. It's silly, it knows it, and it commits fully to the absurd spectacle with practical creatures and real kills that land harder than CGI would.
But It's transparently a B-movie with variable acting and a plot held together with duct tape. The fun is in the trash, not the craft.

God Bless America2012
Both films weaponize frustrated rage as their central pleasure, finding dark comedy in characters finally acting on the impulses society demands they suppress—but where Mayhem is a viral rampage, this is ideological.
A dying man and a teenage girl go on a killing spree targeting reality TV stars and social parasites. It's Bobcat Goldthwait's misanthropic fever dream, ugly and brilliant and genuinely unhinged, a rant with a body count.
But It's aggressively bleak, morally chaotic, and built entirely on the director's contempt for contemporary culture. The politics are messy and the tone never relents, which reads as exhausting rather than cathartic to some.

Happiness1998
Like Mayhem, it strips away social polish to expose what lies underneath, but where the virus is external and immediate, Solondz's characters reveal themselves deliberately—less action film than unflinching character study of the impulses Mayhem lets loose.
A sprawling ensemble portrait of suburban dysfunction where desires are honest and consequences are real. Todd Solondz weaponizes dark comedy against our expectations, building genuine pathos from characters we're trained to despise.
But It's transgressive in ways that haven't softened with age—pedophilia, sexual violence, despair treated as comedy. Many will find it revolting rather than illuminating, and it earns that reaction.

People
Cast
Steven YeunDerek Cho
Samara WeavingMelanie Cross
Steven BrandJohn Towers
Caroline ChikezieKara Powell
Kerry FoxIrene Smythe
Dallas RobertsLester McGill
Mark FrostEwan Niles
André EriksenColton Snyder
Nikola KentOswald
Lucy ChappellJenny
Bojan PerićMiles
Directing
- Joe LynchDirector
- Christopher LandryFirst Assistant Director
- Marina LešićScript Supervisor
- Maria NitaSecond Assistant Director
- Milana MilunovićSecond Second Assistant Director
Writing
- Matias CarusoWriter
Production
- Buddy EnrightExecutive Producer
- Anđelija VlaisavljevićLine Producer
- Renee MinasianPost Production Coordinator
- Lawrence MattisProducer
- Matt SmithProducer
- Mehrdad ElieProducer
- Parisa CavianiProducer
- Sean SorensenProducer
- Sandra DjurickovicProduction Accountant
- Ana BiskupljaninProduction Coordinator
- Buddy EnrightUnit Production Manager
Recommended by
The Hunt, The Belko Experiment, Tag, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Tragedy Girls, Detention