The Retreat

Yeah yeah, it’s lazy criticism to just compare a thing to another, similar thing. But listen. There are two Canadian lesbian cabin in the wilderness horror movies now. I watched What Keeps You Alive a while back. I was pretty unmoved by it. But The Retreat is the lesser of the two. In hindsight, maybe I was too tough on What Keeps You Alive? No, never mind. It’s still a pretty mediocre movie. The Retreat is just an even weaker product.

The Retreat is your classic urban vs rural horror story, now with queer elements. The opening scene depicts a gay male couple going up to a cabin for a hook-up before someone approaches them and there’s a cut to black of implied violence. Then, we get to the main story which is about different gay people going to the same cabin. But this time, it’s lady gays. Renee and Valerie rent the same cabin where we saw the gay men die. They go up there and it’s a horror movie, so they don’t have a relaxing time. Some people want to hurt and kill them and livestream the event.

There’s very little novelty in The Retreat. Each beat of this story is something you’ve seen before in other horror media. It doesn’t add much new to its basic plot of some people from the city go to a rural cabin and have a bad time. I think this was a case where the makers thought that adding a queer element to the story is enough to transform it. And I don’t think it does. The story still hits all the same beats. And within the grand scheme of queer stories, I feel like I’ve seen this one a few times too.

The film is very gay-positive which means pretty early on it becomes obvious that Renee and Valerie are going to take revenge on their captors. Another fairly predictable plot point. This revenge is depicted as triumphant. Especially once we learn that, surprise! The people doing violence to them are homophobic. Again, I remain unmoved. Definitely seen a lot of stories about people doing violence for homophobic reasons. Seen some real life examples of this as well. I don’t think it’s a story of queer triumph when most of the narrative is queer people being brutalized. Yes, they get their revenge. But there’s a lot more focus on the violence done to them than the violence they inflict.

And as ever, the real question with The Retreat isn’t about story or queer representation. It all boils down to, is it scary? And no, it’s very much not. The Retreat keeps pulling its punches. This is not a particularly brutal film. Frequently, the film will cut away instead of showing any real gore. And even the stuff they do show is nothing to write home about. You could see this level of violence and gore on network television. Even without the gore, there’s also no sense of tension or dread. The pacing and atmosphere don’t add anything to a story that desperately needs them to.

I’m remarkable uninspired by The Retreat. I’ve seen every single aspect of this film multiple times in other places. And without going too far afield, What Keeps You Alive still exists as a very direct comparison. I can’t stress enough that I thought What Keeps You Alive was middling. But it’s still the far superior film to The Retreat. What Keeps You Alive had a few novel ideas, a little more violence and some better atmosphere. There’s not a single aspect of The Retreat that is superior to What Keeps You Alive.

Overall rating: 4.5/10

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