Corporate Retreat

Corporate Retreat enters the growing subgenre of workplace horror-comedies that have emerged in the last couple of decades. Younger filmmakers seem to have recognized faster than previous generations that working in corporate America is a soul-sucking grind, teeming with problematic executives who exploit their underpaid workers and reap all the financial rewards. Movies such as Severance (2006), about a team-building exercise gone wrong, and Bloodsucking Bastards (2015), about a vampire-exec who literally drains the life out of his employees, have commented on the exploitative nature of capitalist business cultures. These movies play like Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999), except with more blood, and prove generally entertaining. The same cannot be said about Corporate Retreat, about a group of young C-suiters who find themselves fighting for survival in a torture-porn scenario. Ill-conceived and executed, the experience is a mess from start to finish and demands to be watched at home, where you can crack jokes at the movie’s expense. 

To be sure, I only enjoyed my viewing because, when my wife and I attended the movie on a Thursday evening preview screening, we were the only people who showed up. After about 15 minutes, it became clear that we would be alone in the auditorium. Gradually, our reserved chuckles turned into mocking laughter, which gave way to quips and open conversation, like a private episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Had other people been present, we would have remained silent so as not to disturb fellow moviegoers. But we would have enjoyed seeing Corporate Retreat much less. Frankly, a straight viewing would have been unbearable. Director Aaron Fisher, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kerri Lee Romeo, delivers not a single convincing scene or idea. The characters, performances, and setup are unbelievable, and Fisher is overly reliant on nonsensical, grisly violence to keep audiences captivated. 

The movie opens with flashy onscreen titles and arrows to introduce the leadership team at Immaculate Pond Technologies—a company that, if it really earns a billion dollars in annual revenue, as suggested by its CEO (Benjamin Norris), must do something other than design tech to make small lakes beautiful. Peppy HR head Billie (Kirby Johnson) has booked the executives a weekend at Paradise, a lavish New Age wellness center situated atop a hill in the middle of a suburban Southwest landscape. The location remains a confusing detail because the staff, Lola (Sasha Lane) and Amber (Zión Moreno), keep calling the spot “isolated.” But in the movie’s many exterior drone shots, one can clearly see that residential homes surround the spot. Indescrepancies and discontinuities like this crop up throughout Corporate Retreat, giving the movie a slapdash quality.

The premise has potential. Not long after the visitors arrive, Lola and Amber hold them at gunpoint and force them into a series of increasingly dangerous trials. It’s less about team-building than achieving “transcendence,” as defined by Arthur (Alan Ruck), the Immaculate Pond founder who was ousted by his younger colleagues. Arthur claims his intent is altruistic, aimed at bringing about a new understanding of the universe (or whatever). But Arthur is little more than an embittered businessman intent on vengeance through a series of macabre tests that only Jigsaw from the Saw franchise could admire. Arthur preaches about an obscure system that requires participants to endure various “experiences” to pass through the “seven gateways” toward transcendence. These experiences range from lasting in an extremely hot sauna to stabbing themselves with long wooden spikes. Ruck gives an over-the-top performance, playing such an obvious wacko that it strains credibility to think either Lola or Amber would consider him a “genius.” 

Corporate Retreat is unclear about whether Arthur conceived his transcendence initiative, but he clearly hasn’t endured the “experiences” himself. The penultimate task, for instance, requires the staff to gouge out an eye with a spoon. Arthur and his two enforcers still have both eyes, yet he continues to talk about the scheme as though they’ve experienced it firsthand. None of the characters undergoing these trials proves all that distinct, save for Ginger (Odeya Rush), a psychology student who’s not an Immaculate Pond employee and only tagged along because she’s dating the douchebag corporate counsel (Elias Kacavas). Much like the Saw movies, the filmmakers make the victims either unlikable or flavorless, devoid of personality and memorable lines. The actors perform their dialogue in a way that feels rehearsed and unnatural. Besides Ruck, the other notable actor in the cast, Rosanna Arquette, plays a character who dies too soon to leave an impression. When the other characters begin dying, it’s difficult to care since Fisher and Romero haven’t written people who seem to exist outside of the movie’s borders. 

Other details are just embarrassing or confusing. A scene with a community syringe is laughably unrealistic-looking. A random passer-by delivers a line reading so badly when his partner dies that I burst into uncontrolled laughter. And when the movie descends into a final-act shootout, the low-budget production relies on CGI for its muzzle flashes, while Moreno in particular struggles to replicate the machine gun’s recoil with her awkward movements. Fisher doesn’t lean into his movie’s comic potential enough to make this a B-movie lark—and if he meant it to be, the result didn’t deliver any intentional laughs. It’s not even a worthwhile schlockfest that I could see gorehounds enjoying. Instead, Corporate Retreat often tries to look cool or scary, but it ends up feeling phony and shoddily executed, with compositions derived from better films, such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Pulp Fiction (1994), that Fisher has no business inserting here. It’s 90 minutes of confounding and unconsidered story logic, carried out with the clunky energy of Uwe Boll or Paul W.S. Anderson.