Ottawa has no shortage of ways to spend a Friday night — a patio on Elgin Street, a show at the NAC, a stroll along the Rideau Canal — and after sitting through Corporate Retreat, you'll wish you'd chosen any of them.
The Setup Has Promise
On paper, the concept works. A group of corporate executives head out for a team-building retreat in the wilderness, only to discover that their charismatic leader has turned homicidally against them. It's The Hunt meets Succession, and in the right hands, that could have been a sharp, darkly funny thriller with something to say about power, loyalty, and the theatre of office culture.
Director Aaron Fisher clearly understood the assignment — at least in the early going. The film opens with enough slow-burn dread to suggest a tightly wound 90 minutes ahead. Alan Ruck (Succession's own Connor Roy) is well-cast as a man whose polished corporate exterior barely conceals something sinister, and the retreat setting — isolated cabins, dense forest, no cell signal — checks every thriller box.
Where It Falls Apart
Somewhere around the 30-minute mark, Corporate Retreat loses the thread and never finds it again. The screenplay mistakes slow pacing for suspense, and what should feel like mounting dread instead feels like watching a group meeting that's running 20 minutes over schedule.
Odeya Rush, who has shown real range in other projects, is saddled with a protagonist so thinly written she barely registers as a person. Rosanna Arquette is criminally underused in a role that amounts to little more than set dressing. Ashton Sanders fares slightly better — his scenes carry an unpredictability the rest of the film desperately needs — but even he can't rescue a third act that telegraphs every twist from a mile out.
The violence, when it finally arrives, feels perfunctory rather than shocking. A revenge thriller lives and dies on catharsis, and Corporate Retreat delivers none.
The Ottawa Verdict
If you're browsing what's on at Cineplex Lansdowne or SilverCity Gloucester this weekend, Corporate Retreat is the kind of film that sounds better as a concept than it plays as a movie. Ottawa Life reviewed it so you don't have to sit there mentally drafting your grocery list while characters in matching fleece vests jog through a forest.
For a better cinematic evening, check what's on at the Ottawa International Film Festival's year-round programming, or keep an eye on the ByTowne Cinema for independent titles that actually take risks. If you want a revenge thriller done right, there are far stronger options available on streaming tonight — saving you both the ticket price and the parking on Bank Street.
Corporate Retreat isn't painful to watch, just profoundly forgettable — which might be the unkindest thing you can say about a film trying this hard to be dangerous.
Rating: 4.5/10
Corporate Retreat is currently in theatres. Running time approximately 95 minutes. Rated 14A.
Source: Ottawa Life Magazine
