It's been a while since I spun the Netflix Roulette wheel. Back in the day, it was a good way to generate ideas for blogging. The downside is the amount of sheer crap Netflix has traditionally packed onto its platform. My will to write anything has been at a low ebb this summer, so I gave it a spin this week. Imagine my surprise when it landed on The Conference (2023, directed by Patrik Eklund), a film I watched last year and which greatly exceeded my admittedly low expectations for it. I neglected to write about it last year. It's a mistake I'll rectify right here.
The Conference is one of those films that makes me question whether it's the slasher film that I dislike or if it's the incompetence of most slasher films I dislike. The Conference is a wickedly smart, mercilessly creative bloodbath that weaves a few wrinkles into the fabric of the slasher formula that result in something that's more than just a bunch of elaborate gore scenes. Fans of elaborate gore scenes should not despair, however. It has those, too. It has those in great abundance. The Conference is not blazingly original. The idea of a slasher rampaging through a group of co-workers on a team-building retreat is at least as old as Severance (2006) and probably much older. This story construction removes the slasher movie from its usual moral universe where punishment is dispensed for the moral transgressions disapproved of by puritans and other assorted blue-noses. It places it instead in an even more political/economic context at the other end of the spectrum. This is the kind of wish fantasy in which the entitled rich assholes get the most gruesome death scenes rather than the sluttiest teenagers because predatory capitalism and its attendant corruption must be punished. In a film at least. I'm not so naive as to believe something like this would happen in our own world. In our own world, the bad sleep well. In any event, The Conference adds some flavor of its own to this kind of fantasy, but it is still very much a film in which feckless characters are picked off one by one by a lunatic with a flair for elaborate murders. What matters here, if you'll pardon the pun, is the execution...