The Retreat

Well acted; the only one I knew was Aaron Ashmore. They all did a good job. Violent and visceral, over the top protagonists, and a proper ending. The theme is a little wokeish. My only gripe is we now seem to be in a PC age where the victims never let loose, giving pain to the baddies; they are often dispatched painlessly and quick ( I want revenge to be seen ) IE the remake of I Spit on your grave, and similar. It did what it said on the tin and kept my attention.

I don't know a thing about lighting but I do know that when I'm looking at black screen during many scenes, something is wrong. Lighting or not, there is not much to this movie. And emphasizing "lesbian" couple is odd. Straight couple or lesbian couple....the movie would the exact same.

Alyson Richards' script tells the story of a young lesbian couple who want to reignite the passion in their relationship by going to an off grid retreat in a remote part of Ontario. Instead of finding a long weekend of lovemaking, the couple is captured by a group of homophobic survivalists who make money showing their bloody torture acts on the web.

As far as the horror goes, the plot is just a variation of 100 other movies where city dwellers fall into the hands of insane hillbillies. The couple is suffering from the same "need a way back to each other" dynamic they do in all these films. In this case, the hillbillies have a special kind of hate, but they aren't much different than the one in the other movies.

What's different is how angry the women are at the people who attacked them. They don't really want to be rescued by the police. They want to waste the monsters and leave the world a safer place. What's also different is how uniting against the common enemy reunites the women, and makes them a stronger couple.

This movie is about the needless political attacks on the LGBTQ community, and the legacy of pain and anger it leaves. The whole point of the movie is that the women are made stronger by uniting and vanquishing the threat.

As a horror movie, it's mediocre and made on a shoestring. The lighting is so dark it's hard to watch on a tv and the scares aren't very scary. The scares aren't really there to scare the viewer anyway.

As a political statement, the scares just make the viewer angry, which is what Richards wants. She is telling the world that there are lots of people who would cheer for the deaths of LGBTQ people. She wants the world to know "homophobia" is a nice word for "hate." She doesn't believe LGBTQ people are safe as long as homophobia exists, and she is right about it,

When I sat down to watch this 2021 thriller/horror movie titled "The Retreat" from writer Alyson Richards and director Pat Mills, I must admit that my expectations weren't all that high, as the movie had managed to acquire a rating of 3.6 stars here on IMDb.

But still, it being a movie that I hadn't already seen, of course I managed to find the time to watch it.

And sure, "The Retreat" was a watchable movie, albeit a very mundane and generic one at that, especially for a movie such as this, set in the trapped in the wilderness and stalked by killers genre. If there is such a thing.

The storyline was pretty straight forward, but it suffered heavily from being rather generic and predictable. Sure, it was watchable and entertaining enough, but the storyline does leave lots to be wanted. The movie had potential to be much more than what director Pat Mills managed to make it into.

The acting in the movie was adequate. Now, a movie such as "The Retreat" is not the type of movie heavily reliant on Shakespearian performances, so don't consider yourself in for some mind-blowing and amazing acting performances here. Sure, I will say that the acting was okay for the movie, but that was about it.

The overall feel to the movie was just bland. Writer Alyson Richards didn't bring anything new to the genre, and just played it safe by following a strict 'how-to-make-a-trapped-in-the-wilderness-stalked-by-killers' blueprint. So everything you see in "The Retreat" is something that has been done and seen countless times before in other movies of the same type, and more often done better than what was done here in "The Retreat".

The movie was just rather devoid of ghastly things to keep the motivation going. I mean, there just was limited amounts of gore and violence in the movie, something which could have helped promote the overall enjoyment of "The Retreat" somewhat.

It felt a little bit too scripted and too much of an easy ride for the two main characters in the movie as they went through what was supposed to be a harrowing ordeal of being trapped in the wilderness and stalked by killers. They just seemed to stroll through the events a bit too easily. And that made for a rather mundane movie experience, because it was lacking that element of terror, dread, hardship and actually being at risk.

While I managed to sit through the entire movie, I must say that "The Retreat" was actually better than I had anticipated. But don't get me wrong here, because I am not saying that "The Retreat" was an outstanding movie experience. Hardly so. Nay, "The Retreat" was watchable, yes, but it was just too bland and generic actually.

My rating of "The Retreat" lands on a very mediocre five out of ten stars.

I liked it, it was very typical though nothing we haven't seen before or something special I have seen films just like this a million times. But it had some tension in it and it was really enjoyable to spend my time I think it deserves to be watched at least once.