Joel on Film

Aaron Fisher’s Corporate Retreat is a despicable film of abject cruelty, matched only by its pure and unadulterated foolishness. On the surface, it’s another one of those movies in which a group of closely related people are brought together to play a twisted game, the creation of a madman who might have some kind of broad point to make by their capture. If this description brings to mind an inexplicably popular series (still potentially ongoing, though allegedly over as of this writing) from within the past couple decades, it’s not too far off, though even those films featured a villain with a few slightly understandable grievances that turned up every other installment or so.

To give away the motivation of this villain would, of course, violate the unspoken contract between a film critic and his readership, but let it be known that this particular film is bad enough that this writer was tempted to cross it. That line won’t be crossed this time, but it’s almost needless to say at this point that the motivation is far less elaborate and, generally, far less interesting than the puzzle-piece guy’s. It amounts to fairly banal begrudgery, to put it more plainly but still a little mysteriously, and it really isn’t even the point of the film, which was written by Fisher and Kerri Lee Romeo with all the subtlety and nuance of taking a chainsaw to a workplace satire.

The group of people here are initially led by Cliff (Elias Kacavas) and his girlfriend Ginger (Odeya Rush), as the former has invited the latter on a purported romantic getaway, only to reveal that it’s actually (you guessed it) a corporate retreat hosted by a mercurial agency and featuring Cliff’s co-workers. This is one of those companies, by the way, whose purpose is quite literally never specified in a single conversation between these characters—though a recent shakeup at the executive level is of tremendous importance. One supposes it’s a way of keeping things as vague as possible, so that neither Fisher nor Romeo needs to waste their valuable time with things like “character development” or “narrative specificity.”

The other workers comprise a startlingly large group, played by the likes of Ashton Sanders, Benjamin Norris, Tyler Alvarez, Kirby Johnson and Ellen Toland, while Rosanna Arquette makes such a brief appearance as the eldest among the group that she only gets approximately one line of dialogue (at least she probably got a nice little paycheck for a single afternoon’s work). Each of them probably has some defining characteristic, but the filmmakers have forgotten to afford them any, and the actors are so uniformly and paradoxically wooden and mechanical that nothing is able to be elevated from the page. That’s probably fine in the long run, because most of these people will be dead by the end of the movie, on account of the deadly game they’re playing.

Even by psychopathic standards, though, this really is some game, whose master (played by Alan Ruck) watches at first only through a two-way video chat—the better to observe the human guinea pigs at his mercy and to bark orders at his pair of henchwomen (played by Sasha Lane and Zión Moreno). Their task is to do whatever he says, often in a certain amount of quickly decreasing time, or suffer what emerges from the barrel of the two high-powered weapons aimed at their heads. What he has them do is where the cruelty begins.

The tasks do escalate, which one supposes means this simple plot has a sense of forward motion, and here is where Fisher decides to show all the cool practical makeup and prosthetics he had just recently learned how to manipulate and film. At first, it’s as simple as trying to survive a makeshift sauna that keeps getting hotter or figuring out the antidote to a poison or being forced to laugh with meaning under duress. Things get unconscionably worse, though, as a few deaths (including one so callously avoidable, then pointlessly gruesome in what happens to the corpse, that it caused a walkout in this critic’s theater) begin to prove just how serious the gamemaster is.

The name of the game for Fisher is that he will not let up—except if the plot suddenly requires it—on the brutality of the gore and the cruelty here, with the centerpiece sequence, a “gag” involving spoons and one’s own eyeball, going on for so long that it moves through distinct and recognizable phases: grotesquerie, then self-parody, then just pointless viciousness without a punch line. It also speaks to the characters’ astonishing foolishness that the movie allows them to allow the scene to go on for as long as it does, while Fisher apparently pretends not to realize just how stupid and useless it all is and these characters are. Then again, maybe he does, and the movie is deliberately nasty for the sake of being nasty.

A lot of this would be easier to accept, were it not for the crudeness of the filmmaking, the dullness of the performances and the flimsy repetition of it all. Corporate Retreat, as with most similarly minded movies to warrant no stars on the chosen rating spectrum, is without merit or, more importantly, value.

Rating: zero stars (out of ****)