Title – The Conference (2023)

Director – Patrik Eklund (Flicker) 

Cast – Katia Winter, Adam Lundgren, Eva Melander

Plot – On a team building conference retreat before the grand unveiling of a new high profile development, a corporate team become embroiled in a deadly game of cat and mouse when a mysterious killer infiltrates their remote facility. 

“Is this a joke?”

Review by Eddie on 28/02/2024

Sharing DNA with cult horror film Severance, sprinkled with the same type of dark humour becoming synonymous with Swedish films such as Triangle of Sadness and The Square and not afraid to get very bloody with a collection of ghastly murders and demises, Patrik Eklund’s Netflix horror/comedy The Conference has components and ideas working in its favour but this work retreat with a difference doesn’t have the warm bodies or smarts to be regarded as a trip worth taking. 

Oscar nominee Eklund can’t be accused of not trying to instil his darkly minded slasher with a range of different elements outside of bloody kills and claret spills with The Conference touching on mental illness, environmental activism and tensions between co-workers but there’s not a single character in this tale of complicated corporate types clashing and being slashed to make his film enjoyable when it’s not going for cat and mouse chills or outright carnage. 

Lead by Katia Winter’s troubled and tormented Lina who finds herself in a battle of wits against her boss Jonas, played with significant sleaze by Adam Lundgren, as the two, alongside a collection of their co-workers, find themselves in a remote retreat before the grand unveiling of a highly publicised new development in the otherwise quiet country area, a team building exercise that turns very quickly into a battle to survive a masked killer that has murder on their mind. 

A lot of The Conference feels familiar and while the Swedish setting and cultural observances and wit is skewered differently to the western mould, Eklund’s film is never as smart of entertaining as it wants to be and it’s never a good sign for these type of films where you as an audience member are rooting for the killer hoping they will quickly and surely save us from spending anymore time with a bunch of characters we’d rather not have met in the first place. 

Alongside this issue is the cold hard fact that The Conference is for far too much of its on paper brief 90 or so minute runtime a real drag.

With a large chunk of screentime given to character interactions that are neither interesting or valuable to the film in the grand scheme of things, The Conference may provide some small-scale visceral thrills and inventive kills in amongst its proceedings but for the most part, audience members will be finding their minds wandering off to other places far removed from the idyllic surrounds of this conference facility, wishing that they had taken a different trip with their valuable time. 

Final Say – 

A film with not a lot to say but far too much allotment of time to say it, The Conference has some inventive moments in the kills and spills department but its lack of laughs, bare-bones characters, scrappy scripting and unrefined components halt this Netflix offering in its tracks. 

2 outboard motors out of 5