Aaron Fisher's bloody thriller Corporate Retreat plays a little like The Menu, but much dumber, much gorier, and without the gorgeous food; rather, it's lots of arguing between empty-headed characters as the body count rises.
Employees of a billion-dollar tech company prepare for a weekend team-building retreat. While the others board the bus, Cliff (Elias Kacavas) decides to drive himself in his convertible, and brings along his girlfriend Ginger (Odeya Rush), without telling her where they are going. Retreat employees Amber (Zión Moreno) and Lola (Sasha Lane) check them in and confiscate their phones, while Carl (Ashton Sanders), Omar (Tyler Alvarez), Billie (Kirby Johnson), Aubrey (Ellen Toland), Devin (Benjamin Norris), and Deborah (Rosanna Arquette) settle in.
They are told that they will be discovering the "Seven Gateways." It's not long before Deborah disappears and strange things begin to happen, like the group being locked in a hot sauna. As the ringmaster reveals himself, the challenges to achieve the next Gateway become more and more violent.
Corporate Retreat makes a point of introducing us to all the characters with title cards, indicating their names and their positions in the company (called Immaculate Pond Technologies), as if that meant something. As the movie progresses, they are almost indistinguishable, personality-wise, as petty, selfish, scared, greedy, etc. As characters die, no one seems to care. No one mourns them or is affected in any way by their loss.
The Big Bad (Alan Ruck) gives a fairly typical psychopathic villain performance (a far cry from Ralph Fiennes's work). As we get to the nauseating sequence (teased on the poster) in which the retreaters must dig out their own left eyes with a spoon — which is shown in great detail, over and over again — we are left with a question. If Ruck's character and his lackies Amber and Lola have already achieved transcendence, why are their eyes intact?
Clearly the filmmakers didn't put much thought into the mess that is Corporate Retreat. Only Odeya Rush as the "final girl" Ginger, who wasn't even supposed to be there that day, adds a bit of sass to the proceedings, but she probably should have retreated when she had the chance.
