The Retreat (2022)

Stop me if you've heard this one before ...

Two women arrange to meet up with  male friends in an isolated cabin.  Once they get there, they find their friends are missing and are marauded by some distinctly unfriendly locals.

"That's a warning sign, isn't it?  We should heed that.  We shoul go back ... Oh, wait, don't leave me alone ..."

That is about as basic a horror film scenario as you can get, without involving babysitters and a masked killers.  The twist that makes The Retreat slightly - very slightly - different is that the cabin attendees are gay - two queer women meeting up with their queer male friends for a weekend away, unaware that the locals are distinctly unwelcoming to the rainbow community.

It's not exactly a radical innovation - horror films have often focused on frowned-upon sexual activity, and you could argue the shift from villain to victim signals some advancement for the rainbow community.  But beyond this, the film is pretty obvious and very slow moving.  It's passable entertainment, but nothing more.  Even the political angle - which is possibly triggering for edgelords - is only briefly alluded to.

The plot is straightforward, with no subtleties or twists.  We don't even get the standard tropes you might expect to see such as the closeted member of the persecuting group who either does or does not switch sides; or the oppressed woman who hates what she can't have.  The motivations of the hunters aren't explored, beyond just hating queer people.

"This holiday sucks.  I am TRASHING this place on Tripadvisor."

You also have to wonder, how do they manage to get a regular supply of LBGTQIA+ people to slay for their darkweb snufftube operation?  They've clearly developed quite a business plan, with a central CCTV monitoring hub, pre-planned killing fields and cameras set up all over the place ... So where does the meat for the grinder (pun intentional) come from?  Do they send out invites?  Or is the cabin is a secret hidey-hole for the entire rainbow community?  Either way, surely someone would notice that people don't always come home after their weekend jaunt into the woods?  Or do they resort to kidnapping people off the city streets?

Look, it isn't like originality or coherence are essentials of the genre.  After all, how does Michael Myers know how to drive a car?  Or rig dead bodies to swing down from closets at just the right moment to spook Laurie Strode?

SURPRISE!!  Michael Myers had two interests - homicide and constructing ludicrous ly well timed pranks.  And driving.

So perhaps expecting The Retreat to do more is unfair.  But by trying just a bit harder, it could have made its point far more effectively, by indicating that - on some level - the homophobic predators are tolerated or encouraged.  Finding a ledger listing all the previous victims, or a map showing hunting zones where they can acquire 'subjects' or trying to tell the police only to find the police are complicit ... It would have made for a more cohesive, and sinister film.

But that never happened, so we are left with what we are left with.  And that - unfortunately - isn't very scary, suspenseful or exciting. The director has a drone and wants to show it off at every opportunity.  The setting is evocative and creepy, which justifies that, I suppose.  The performances from the two main actors are good, though the script doesn't give them much to work with, and what it does offer  them is a bit ... conventional ... shall we say? 

Like so many female lead characters in action, thriller and horror films they are hampered with a bit of relationship angst where one won't commit fully and the other wants her to and ... You get the idea.  It doesn't ever seem to be enough when you have female leads simply to have them be hunted and be worried about surviving.  There has to be some emotional or relationship baggage.  Ripley had to feel sad about her real daughter and her de facto daughter in Aliens (though not in the first film, where the character was originally written as male);  Nancy in The Shallows didn't just have to fend off a hungry shark, but had to realise ... something ... about her relationship with her mother; Lt. Sinclair  in The Lair doesn't just have to contend with being shot down, Taliban gunmen and a monster than lives in an old Soviet bunker, she has to feel guilty about being a bad mother and leaving her child behind; and here Renee and Valerie have to sort out their relational crap while dodging homphobic bullets and bear traps.

"We are women in a horror film so we can't just be happy before the shit hits the fan."

So it seems our main characters aren't just battling the sadistic hate of their hunters, but the conventional mindset of the film makers, who can't conceive of their characters - for all their rainbow credentials - being any different from standard females from Character and Plot Dynamics 101.

Chuck Norris never had to deal with this nonsense.

But, again, maybe I'm being unfair.  Maybe The Retreat isn't setting out to be any of the things I want it to be.  Maybe it just wants to be a cookie-cutter horror-thriller with a tiny, tiny element of political awareness.  Perhaps the Retreat is actually just a trying to achieve a very small advance (see what I did there?).

In which case, it is successful enough.  It won't thrill or scare anyone - unless, like I said, that person is some snowflake edgelord wannabe.

Of which there are plenty, I suspect.

Star Rating: **