The Wasteland Reviewer

Corporate Retreat (2026) Written Review

How much would you want to go on a retreat with all the leadership at your job? I am sure many of us would avoid this opportunity as hard as we could. You would especially want to avoid the corporate retreat going on in Aaron Fisher’s new psychological horror film. With a name like Corporate Retreat, you certainly have an idea of the setting. Fisher certainly has some surprises up his sleeve though with how this technology company’s top brass is tortured by their former leader on top of a secluded new age mansion. No phones. Matching shirts. Activities involving self-mutilation. The horrors that Fisher has in-store in Corporate Retreat are wild for sure.

 Does the screenplay from Fisher and Kerri Lee Romeo make the most of this interesting premise of a corporate retreat turn into an unhinged revenge plot (or is it)? You can give some credit with how efficiently the script gets this wild ride set up. The characters in this unfortunate game certainly are not the deepest but you get a quick understanding of where each of them fit into this organization and what they bring to the table. Of course, there is a mysterious interloper (Odeya Rish portrays the girlfriend of the team’s lawyer who tricks her into a “romantic weekend away”) who winds up being a big player as these characters are systematically destroyed. The “activities” they are asked to do feel ripped from an evil escape room (which we have seen in horror films before), but they unfortunately get drilled into the group with overlong execution and repetitive natures. For such a wild and twisted film, you would expect more surprises, but the script plays its narrative beats too safely. The film is also bogged down by terrible character logic as this whole film is contingent upon everyone acting completely idiotic throughout. The only truly interesting character in the whole film is their former boss and now captor. Too many of the characters are just annoyingly written or given little to work with character wise. 

What does Fisher bring to the film from behind the camera? One of the most noticeable elements of the film is its lower budget. This rears its ugly head with too many aspects of the film feeling clunky and thrown together. The sound mixing is all types of wrong with distortion in the dialogue and a mixture of different sounds just feeling uneven in presentation. Whenever there is some action going on, the camerawork becomes unintelligible and will honestly hurt your eyes trying to watch it. There are moments when some type of stunt is performed and it is edited to the point of not being able to process what happened. The devil is in the details, and Corporate Retreat is haunted by too many small details that are unconvincing or just plain illogical. But the practice effects for the gore are quite impressive for a film of this size. Unfortunately, the pacing of the film is quite uneven with the first act moving along briskly then the rest of the film slowing down way too much to get through these repetitive tasks placed in front of the characters. Tonally, the film is certainly off with some disgustingly brutal gore to the point of making you want to leave the auditorium (unless you are REALLY into gore porn type films). The film is obviously trying to be funny at times in the script, but the tone never quite captures that in an effective way. In the end, the film also feels quite hollow with a distinct lack of emotion or connection to these characters. 

How does the cast fair with the material handed to them? There are only a few true standouts. Alan Ruck (their former boss) is an absolute delight with his unhinged and wild energy (one of the only saving graces of the second half of the film). Rosanna Arquette is such an authentic performer, and it is a shame that they get discarded so quickly in the film. Ashton Sanders truly feels like the only cast member in the crew of corporate leaders who delivers a consistently believable and authentic performance (which makes his decisions along the way so much more harrowing). Sasha Lane and Zion Moreno are given roles with some solid potential but the execution of them is quite inconsistent. They have some genuinely funny moments with their performances, but they are each saddled with a lot of physicality that just doesn’t land right (leading to some extremely distracting moments in the film). The rest of the cast ranges from flat to uneven to just downright terrible (with a few minor performances feeling horribly distracting). Ruck could only do so much to keep this one afloat.

Does Corporate Retreat deliver the goods as a twisted horror experience? That really depends on your tolerance of gore. Fisher dives headlong into some brutal horror elements that just go a bridge too far for most. Gratuitous and clunky, Corporate Retreat never lives up to its concept. There are too many flaws that bring this film down with only a single performance being the consistent strong point.