A Psych Degree Might Save Lives, but it Can’t Save ‘Corporate Retreat’ [Review]

I respect hustle. It’s not easy making a movie, let alone getting it placed in theaters across the country. Corporate Retreat, from filmmaker Aaron Fisher, has the enviable honor of being screened right now for millions of potential audience members. Now, less enviable, is how likely those same audience members are to gouge out their own eyes with a spoon. It’s a preferable fate.

Not to rag too hard, but Corporate Retreat really is the nadir of horror filmmaking. It’s not funny. Not scary. Worst of all, it squanders its premise, and is so aggressively boring, it’s hard not to identify with the torture being seen on screen. You’ll think there’s some kind of transcendence in store for enduring such suffering, but there’s nothing but regret over the cost of tickets and concessions.

Corporate executives for a nebulous tech firm—reportedly valued at over $1 billion– convene at a remote California manor for their titular, annual retreat. Par for the course, Corporate Retreat opens in medias res, gliding over the conclusive carnage before cutting back to where it all got started – conspicuously suspicious retreat staff demanding the confiscation of phones with all the tact and normalcy of a Manson acolyte.

Ginger (Odeya Rush) is there by happenstance. Chief legal officer, Cliff (Elias Kacavas), promised her a romantic weekend when, really, it was a surprise retreat for a company she doesn’t even work for. Now, of the two points of credit I’m willing to award Corporate Retreat, the bloodshed isn’t what I expected at all. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Rosanna Arquette augurs a slasher of sorts as she (after only one line of spoken dialogue) is gruesomely strangled in a sequestered room. But Corporate Retreat has more in line with gathering-gone-wrong fare like Would You Rather or The Invitation than it does, say, Severance.