Ah, another installment in the Times Square chronicles for this critic, and this time, a film truly worthy of such an environment — meaning, it’s insufferable down to the very last frame. The only things Aaron Fisher’s Corporate Retreat has going for it, at least on paper, are the parts of its premise: executives are subjected to brutal tests of will and get picked off one by one in the process; the supposed gore and shock value of the test results; and Sasha Lane. Fisher and team do none of these elements justice.
Lane has developed a fascinating career in renegade crevices of the indie, and occasionally mainstream, film scene. From her wildcard presence in American Honey and ferocity as a core member of the eco-martyrs in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, to her lower-register but refreshingly unbothered appearances in blockbuster IP like Twisters and Loki, she often elevates material. But here, in a dismal, lazy, and uninspired blip of a quasi-slasher, Lane is regrettably neutered. Her character is as monotone as her blazer, and that’s a particularly difficult feat to pull off when you’re working with an actress of her caliber — and when said actress is quite literally holding an assault rifle for a majority of the runtime.
More than neutered — electroconvulsed into a vegetative state could be an accurate description — is Corporate Retreat‘s premise. The routine torture, humiliation, and slaughter of executives of some fictitious shell of a company (assets, consulting, liquidation, or whatever fill-in-the-blank you want to choose) sounds, in this current economy, like it could have made for serrated fun. Who among us hasn’t harbored rage for a CEO or CFO at some point? But instead, Fisher untethers the plot from any critical framework or underlying social theme, and rushes to the reveal that this is all some petty scheme devised by a slighted former head of the company.
Even the two gun-wielding disciples, one of them portrayed by Lane, enact the antagonist’s dirty work while he barks orders from a distance, never getting a character arc or any semblance of depth. There’s an opportunity here that bafflingly wasn’t seized; the filmmakers could have crafted an exploited labor context for the grunts on the front lines, or cult manipulation, or simply removed the vengeful ex-CEO from the narrative to allow these two ruthless characters to breathe, to bear relatable motivations for attacking executives. Then again, the dialogue is too rampantly atrocious to begin with, so perhaps this is all a moot point.
Some reviews have applied the “torture porn” subgenre label to Corporate Retreat. This is already a contentious topic among critics, scholars, and filmmakers often lumped into that category by the former, and in this case is more offensively misguided than the movie itself; sure, it “shows” an executive’s heart getting ripped out, a decapitation, corpses dangling on meathooks, self-crucifixion, and for some reason four characters in succession gouging their eye out with an ordinary metal spoon. Yet while all of this is lingered on, the gaze doing the lingering is never unflinching. The viscera is blurry, the camerawork is shaky, the editing choppy at best, and the acting stilted and unconvincing in moments of abject pain.
The group of execs thus never become distinct from one another or fleshed-out in their own right — not enough even to root for them to be murdered, much less to find a shimmer of humanity in a single one. Ultimately, in the wake of shoddy craft and vapid vision, Corporate Retreat offers no interest but gore; or rather, cave projections of gore, pining for impact and never achieving it.
DIRECTOR: Aaron Fisher; CAST: Odeya Rush, Ashton Sanders, Elias Kacavas, Alan Ruck, Sasha Lane; DISTRIBUTOR: Passage Pictures; IN THEATERS: May 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
Comments are closed.