Raindance Film Festival review – Corporate Retreat
Psych student Ginger (Odeya Rush) is whisked off to a romantic weekend by her corporate lawyer boyfriend Cliff (Elias Kacavas) only to find that he’s actually lured her into tagging along on a mandatory team-bonding exercise for the execs at Immaculate Pond Industries – a billion-dollar firm which does something the script isn’t clear about. Frankly, Cliff’s haircut and smarmily high-handed treatment of his girlfriend deserves the death penalty – and this being a horror movie on the gather-horrible-people-in-a-remote-place-and-torture-them-to-death pattern it’s pretty likely he’ll get it. Nice to see Rosanna Arquette as the only exec at IPI over thirty – but she doesn’t even make the starters’ line-up when sandy-jacketed calmness counsellors Amber (Zion Moreno) and Lola (Sasha Lane) show their heavily-signalled true nature and begin putting the retreatees through tests which supposedly are for their spiritual benefit but actually involve mutilation and death.
It turns out that the whole weekend is a trap set up by the ousted CEO of IPI, Arthur (Alan Ruck), who seems to be a loopy combination of Jigsaw, Elon Musk and Your Friendly Neighbourhood Guru. Arthur appears on a big screen to talk his former colleagues through their challenges – though he’s drawn into the physical action later. Director Aaron Fisher, who also co-wrote with Kerri Lee Romeo, riffs a little on deepcut precedents like Severance and 5 Dolls for an August Moon but this is mostly one of those elimination game efforts … and keeps juddering to a halt for the dwindling band of survivors to go through repetitive challenges which range from the unusual (to laugh genuinely amid the carnage) to the predictably wince-making (spoon meet eye – several times too often) to the simply silly (self-sticking giant pins like a human voodoo doll). The playout music is a nice cover of ‘You’re Just Too Good to Be True’.
Only Ruck gets much of a part and he’s just an over-the-top maniac CEO whose charisma we have to take on trust – Lane and Moreno are more interesting as the gun-toting minions, who are going along with this out of conviction but still start to wonder whether it’s going to end well for anyone. The corporate types are one-note (Kirby Johnson is most fun as the peppy HR bod who booked the place) and mostly impossible to warm up to but on the evidence of his behaviour it’s hard to argue that they weren’t right to manoeuvre Arthur out of the company. In theory, Ginger the outsider is an identification figure but why is she with such a creep in the first place – and her skill at playing gruesome painful games comes out of nowhere. It works in the build-up, possibly because the bones of this sort of story – all the way back to Agatha Christie – are unbreakable … but the Gary J. Tunnicliffe gore set-pieces aren’t the only things which will make you look away from the screen.
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