It’s that time of year where the employees of billion dollar company, Immaculate Pond Technologies, are sent on their annual corporate retreat to partake in team building exercises — something they all truly cannot be bothered with. The characters are introduced to us with style: a freeze frame with yellow text telling us who they are, a red hand-drawn arrow pointing to their heads. We first meet general counsel Cliff (Elias Kacavas) and his psychology student girlfriend, Ginger (Odeya Rush), who was led to believe they were going on a romantic getaway. They arrive separately to the rest of Cliff’s cohort: CEO Devin (Benjamin Norris), CFO Carl (Ashton Sanders), human resources officer Billie (Kirby Johnson), and Aubrey (Ellen Toland), Omar (Tyler Alvarez), and Deborah (Patricia Arquette), whose titles I won’t bore you with. Oh, there’s also Martha (Eden Amira), a character who may as well have not existed. Is she in the above photo? No. Is Arquette? No. They killed her off after one line of dialogue. What a waste!
When the Immaculate Pond team arrive at their destination — a large, luxury building situated in the desert city of Phoenix — they’re greeted by staff members Amber (Zión Moreon) and Lola (Sasha Lane) who confiscate their phones. They explain to the team that they will be taking part in a series of experiences that will move them from the physical realm to the spiritual, beginning with a simple meditation exercise. It doesn’t take long before Amber and Lola show up with guns and the team are greeted virtually by their former founder, Arthur (Alan Ruck), who they betrayed and ousted from the company. Arthur claims, however, that he isn’t mad. In fact, he thanks them for freeing him and wants them to transcend just as he has, but by following the seven gateways to spiritual enlightenment. Unfortunately for them, the remaining challenges are rather deadly. “What is this, an escape room?” one of the characters quips.
Too many films these days start without adequate world building and Aaron Fisher’s Corporate Retreat, which he co-wrote with Kerri Lee Romeo, happens to be one of them. It tries to get us to emotionally invest in its characters, but falls flat. Ginger is the clear final girl from the start, an outsider studying abnormal psychology who isn’t afraid to talk back to Arthur, to call him a “psychopathic freak” and use his logic to lure him into his own deadly game. The girl clearly has some fire in her and it’s fun to watch her unpunished backchat, but we don’t really get a sense of who she is. The same can be said for Aubrey, whose degrees in botany, business, and chemistry save them during one of the challenges, and Carl, who does the same in another thanks to his military experience. These scenes offer glimpses into characters that desperately want to be known, but the film forces them to remain one dimensional. Ruck’s performance as the sadistic and delusional ex-CEO is entertaining, but he’s still as bland as everyone else in the end because we’re given no reason to really care about any of the characters or the situation they find themselves in. Despite the same being said for Amber and Lola, these characters were fun to watch and I wish we could’ve gotten more from them.
The film’s premise was intriguing enough to get me to press play but Fisher and Romeo don’t flesh it out at all. The dialogue feels unnatural, focusing primarily on delivering clunky exposition and humourless quips. Fisher opted for a handheld camera, resulting in scenes that are slightly shaky, which may have been to capture the emotional states of the characters. The gore is excessive and done really well, but it becomes tedious to watch as each character repeats the same challenges — one of which was to gouge their left eye out with a spoon. Fisher keeps the camera firmly on the gruesome action, with minimal cutaways to offer a break or show the other characters’ reactions. It forces you into a tortuous monotony of gore that feels gratuitous when the film doesn’t make you invested in its story or its character. I spent a lot of the runtime thinking, “who cares?” By the time the film ended, I thought it had forgotten about some of its characters, but then I realised it was me who had forgotten — forgotten they had been killed off. When you watch so many characters gouging their eyes out, it all kinda blurs into one gory mess and loses its impact.
It’s hard to know what the film’s message is. Is it “fuck rich people”? Probably. But it doesn’t say this. It doesn’t really say anything beyond: look at these bland characters I’m torturing to death for bland reasons. And anyway, what does Immaculate Pond Technologies even do? Something related to ponds? I couldn’t say and perhaps it doesn’t matter, but so little is fleshed out that I’m actually curious about the smaller details. In one scene, before the mastermind is revealed to be Arthur, a character wonders if one of their competitors is trying to kill them… so it feels kind of important. Oh well. Corporate Retreat is gory, bloody, and violent, but not much else. It’s an empty survival horror that doesn’t even offer any of its promised comedy. Torture porn fans, this one’s for you.
Corporate Retreat is showing at Raindance Film Festival on 20th June and 26th June in London. Click here for more information.
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