My quick rating - 4.3/10. At least Corporate Retreat didn't waste time establishing that this team-building exercise is going to be a little more aggressive than trust falls and a tug-of-war. The movie opens with sweeping shots of a gorgeous estate, followed by some dead bodies, because apparently the HR department at Immaculate Ponds has a very different definition of “company culture.”
Then we meet the employees: Cliff (Elias Kacavas), Ginger (Odeya Rush), Carl (Ashton Sanders), Devin, Billie, Omar, Deborah (Rosanna Arquette), Aubrey, and enough other people to make me wonder whether the film was going to remember all of them. Or more importantly, am I supposed to? It helpfully flashes their names and job titles on screen, so at least someone in the production knew I was going to need a cheat sheet.
They're all heading to a corporate retreat, although Cliff has told Ginger they're going on a romantic getaway. That lie probably works better when the destination isn't a mansion where the welcome package includes hanging corpses.
It doesn't take long before someone discovers the bodies and gets grabbed, kicking off a series of Saw-lite trials that deliver plenty of practical gore and some nasty kills. Unfortunately, the movie occasionally lets the CGI blood ruin the fun. One early beheading has blood that doesn't even splatter onto the ground, which is a pretty significant problem when your movie is trying to convince me someone just lost their head. The practical effects fare much better, and when Corporate Retreat gets messy, it can get properly messy.
The corporate satire is there, too, although the script doesn't squeeze nearly enough blood from that particular stone. There are plenty of opportunities to turn workplace politics, ambition, and soulless corporate culture into something truly vicious, but the movie settles for being more of a survival horror with corporate wallpaper. I still identified with plenty of the corporate nonsense enough to enjoy the jabs Aaron Fisher did take.
Rosanna Arquette is also criminally underused. Why bring in Arquette and then barely let her have fun? That's basically a corporate crime in itself. The disgruntled ex-owner Arthur, played by Alan Ruck was a fun nostalgic touch.
Odeya Rush, meanwhile, surprised me. She does a good job carrying the material, especially considering this is very much the sort of horror movie where someone's primary job requirement eventually becomes “try not to get horribly murdered.” The film also knows exactly the audience it's targeting, including one particularly overdrawn eyeball-gouging scene that will absolutely test the limits of anyone who doesn't enjoy watching eyeballs being introduced to blunt objects.
The biggest problem is the script. There's a decent horror-comedy buried in here, and the practical gore, dark humor, and occasional twists show flashes of what this could have been with a little more polish. Instead, it feels like a Saw knockoff that occasionally remembers it has a corporate comedy hiding somewhere inside it.
Still, it's not the worst Saw ripoff I've seen. There's enough blood, ridiculousness, and black humor to keep it moving, and the ending got an actual laugh out of me. Because naturally, after all that corporate carnage and eyeball-spooning, the movie ends with “Can't Take My Eyes Off You.” That's probably the most appropriate performance review the movie could give itself.
https://jackmeat.com/corporate-retreat-2026/
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