Zombos Says: Stylish, good, gory, and definitely may feel like a corporate retreat you may have attended.
Right off the bat I need to warn you. There’s a too-long scene where a spoon meets eyeballs that may dampen your use of spoons in the future. Maybe go for a spork instead if that happens. I say the scene is too long because I really wished it was shorter as I watched the pop and flow intermittently between my open and closed eyelids. No other reason; the whole visual was awesome from a gorehound POV. But I’m not a gorehound. It was also surprising. I certainly wouldn’t have the brand loyalty or corporate spirit to do that. No way. And all during that excruciating scene I kept thinking why are they sharing that damn spoon, aren’t they worried about germs?
Joining the company of retreat-themed movies like Corporate Animals (2019) and Severance (2006), director Aaron Fisher stretches his low-budget stylishly across his confining camera and drone work, within a color palette where the “Arthur’s Got You Brainwashed” yellow shirts pop as much as those eyeballs, and inside an austere corporate monolithic setting of a luxury desert retreat (though shot in LA) that is lit just enough to highlight its broodingly minimalist and near-brutalistic structure. Everything that soon happens within it is pretty brutal too, like in a Kafka and James Arthur Ray walk into a bar sort of way where they’re pouring it on, but not with drinks.
Fisher and co-writer Kerri Lee Romeo keep it simple. Five young and striving tech executives (Odeya Rush, Ashton Sanders, Tyler Alvarez, Ellen Toland, Benjamin Norris), along with their chief HR officer (Kirby Johnson acting perfectly annoying, just like a real HR person), thinking they’re heading into another boring and useless corporate retreat, soon realize this time it’s less team building and more Survivor Island, without the ability to get off the island. Trapped by a former and very disgruntled CEO, Arthur Scott (Alan Ruck loving every minute) takes spiritual self-actualization to the extreme as he blames them for ousting him from the company. He’s intent on teaching them his path to transcendence no matter how bloody or gruesome. His two deluded experience guides, Lola (Sasha Lane) and Amber (Zión Moreno), are locked and loaded to keep the proceedings proceeding. Quick with a bullet for anyone who doesn’t participate as expected, they make quite a scary pair of delusional minions.
Onscreen comic bubbles introduce us to each person and their role at Immaculate Pond Technologies. Preliminary verbal skirmishes give us an idea as to each person’s character in a nutshell. As the mayhem escalates, the mix of corporate-speak and wellness mumbo jumbo shades the horror to absurdity, which is almost funny at times but Fischer never lets the humor breathe for long. It also doesn’t take long for the group to realize something is wrong. Locked doors, gun-toting handlers, the too-hot sauna, and the self-harm workshops alarmingly pile up. Team-building turns to solo survival as they shish kabob themselves with wooden spikes and sacrifice a teammate so the rest can survive, for a little while anyway.
Arthur directs the terror from his camper van via television screen, but finally makes an appearance in person to share his beliefs about the type of employees they need to become and how creative he can be helping them with a soup spoon. His babble about what, to him, is an ideal employee and how they can show it is the subtext throughout the movie that powers the horror, skewers self-serving corporate BS, and plays with the jargon anyone in corporate life has had to suffer through. He just happens to be crazy too, but so sane about it. His guru schtick with its seven gateways to transcendence are reminiscent of movies like Martyrs, Hellraiser, and even Midsommar. And all of us have had bosses like Arthur who endlessly demand the most while giving back the least. To be fair, they didn’t kill us while doing it, so there’s that.
I’m kind of shocked by the low ratings for this movie on IMDb (and often shocked by the high ratings for some movies over there), and Rotten Tomatoes, whose ratings I don’t believe in much either. I’d rate it higher. Sure, you’ve got the usual easy-scripted mix of young masters of the technical universe knuckleheads put into an escape room-like situation, but the camerawork, which almost looks awkward at first, has a will of its own. Moving between solid ground and shaky, it is as much a participant in the mayhem as our unlucky corner office hopefuls, which puts you among them. At first I thought the Vimeo screener I watched was cropped a bit at top, but then I realized the framing was intentional. The economical staging of the characters in group arrangements was effective, especially if you want to watch this movie on a cell phone. It gave each cost-effective setup a strong focus on the characters in closeups and midshots while conveying a this-is-all-wrong-and-unnatural terminal velocity edginess. Add the absurdity of Scott’s escalating and impossible demands and the resulting diminishing body count, it all comes together in a kinetic batshit dread. Which, I must admit, is rather astute as batshit dread did come up a few times during my corporate retreats too, but that could have just been me.
The movie released in 512 theaters and had a low gross at the box office. Time will tell if this becomes a cult favorite. I think it will. It hits streaming July 10th. I urge you to ignore the critics (um, but not me) and give it a try. Just remember to switch to sporks, if needed, afterwards.
