Director: Aaron Fisher
Writer: Aaron Fisher, Kerri Lee Romeo
Stars: Odeya Rush, Alan Ruck, Ashton Sanders
Synopsis: Corporate executives on a team-building retreat face a deadly struggle when their leader turns violently against them.
The “eat the rich,” horror satire is a bit played out. Watching one percenters flatline in gruesome and poetic ways was intriguing the first few times. Then, when the originality of the concept wore off and filmmakers tried to salvage their piece of it with a new gimmick or a different kind of hot take on a theme, it felt hollow. The key to a good horror satire is to get the awkwardness of jumping on the bandwagon out of the way and to show off why your vision and your message is worth the overfamiliarity the audience has with the concept. The film Corporate Retreat is a hollow void of tortuous gore with little understanding of the concept of comedy or satire and has no new or unique take on any message whatsoever.
The story moves fast. The story moves so fast that the first kill is entirely meaningless because the character who dies has had absolutely no development beyond a couple meaningless lines along with a name and company title. By the second kill you begin to wonder about what the point of this exercise, both the film’s plot and the act of us watching it, could possibly be. Though, the plot or the point doesn’t seem to matter to the filmmakers at all.
That’s a bold claim, true, but if writers Aaron Fisher and Kerri Lee Romeo did care about their screenplay and subsequent film, they would have taken this concept beyond the first draft. Every piece of dialogue is uninspired. Every “joke” is flat and lifeless. There aren’t any characters at all. There are archetypical positions and none of these archetypes moves an inch further than the boundaries of their mandate allow. All of the details, all of the answers to why, are not even nonsensical, they’re just lazy interpretations of how a psychopath would interpret chakras. So what is this all in service of?
Gore is all that these filmmakers seem to want to create. Gruesome, bloody scenes of mutilation are what these filmmakers took their time on, what they made look the best. It’s more torturous to the viewer that as rushed as absolutely everything else is, we have to sit through some of the most disgusting scenes because these filmmakers have decided to take their time. It makes you long for the ridiculous angles director Aaron Fisher and cinematographer Josh Fisher choose to imbue with meaning, that still have absolutely no meaning whatsoever. We also crave the unwatchable action scenes that are so poorly done with the steadicam that you can’t actually see what’s happening in some aspects like the camera operator wasn’t given a focus and had to try to find, and fail at finding, action as it happened.
Watching self-mutilation, even when you know it’s fake, is a grim affair. It’s absolute sadism to make an audience watch as five people gouge their own eyes out. There’s no speeding up the sequence. The only cuts are to a close up of the eye in various stages of being out of the person’s head. It’s horrifying, nauseating, frustrating, and then comes around to boring. The slower pace on these scenes is deliberate, but they take it beyond what would have made it interesting. It’s the very definition of beating a dead horse.
Corporate Retreat is not horror and is nowhere near satire. Corporate Retreat is a snuff film that’s a bit toned down. Not only is it torturous in its gore, but it’s torturously bad as a film. There is nothing remotely good about it even if the actors are able to sell the inane dialogue and situations. This film feels like it’s something that could have been a Tubi Original. It can’t even be classified as a film; it’s content. Avoid Corporate Retreat like you would if you were invited to an actual corporate retreat.
