Netflix Roulette: The Conference (2023)

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...

The story follows a group of municipal employees on a team-building retreat. They have just secured the land for a big development project and they are celebrating. Not everyone is in a celebratory mood, however. Lina, who has been away from the office during the project, smells something fishy with the finances. She begins to poke around. The hints of impropriety divide her co-workers, too, even as the event is intended to unite them. The project's leader, Jonas, is keen on things coming off as planned because he has a lucrative private sector job in the offing should he pull things off. Lina sneaks into Jonas's cabin and discovers evidence of massive fraud on his computer. IKEA is not going to put a store in the shopping center. The farmers who owned the land are getting screwed. The only person guaranteed of any profit is Jonas. Before she can properly confront him about it, members of the staff at the retreat begin to disappear, while Lina's team is off zip-lining and building improvised boats and whatnot. Once they return to the cabins, they too begin to die in gruesome ways, picked off one by one by someone who has a grudge against our protagonists for cheating his family out of their family farm. At least, that's the theory. This figure adopts the costume of the presumptive mascot of the project, a smiling charcoal burner who looks like the Sawney Bean version of Bob's Big Boy. He's creepy and ridiculous at the same time. Soon, a bloodbath among the co-workers is in the offing, and the fault lines in their working relationships drive wedges that make them all easy pickings for their stalker...

This is an economic horror movie. The moral universe here has class struggle at its roots. I wouldn't go so far as to call it Marxist, but it is certainly anti-capitalist (those aren't necessarily the same thing). It's also an economical horror movie, with clearly defined villains over and above the mad killer at its center, and a linear plot that makes everyone's motivations--killer included--manifestly clear. The killer is fun, but it's almost as much fun watching the victims tear each other apart and connive to undermine each other. What is ultimately surprising is that the film subverts the clues that delineate specific characters as slasher chum. The guy you most want to see killed avoids the killer entirely. He never even confronts him. This is perhaps an example of the idea that the bad sleep well, about how mediocre and corrupt white men are never held to account. The film provides him with a comeuppance, true. The audience wouldn't forgive the filmmakers if they didn't. But the way they go about it is novel. It most reminds me of the remake of Night of the Living Dead. But that's off in the weeds.

The methods employed by the killer are baroque and nasty. When the film has him hang our heroes' supervisor from the flagpole, I had to laugh. It's a fantasy for every working person who has ever butted heads with a toxic but Polyanna-ish supervisor. That character here bullies her employees into corruption with a smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. It's fun watching her get her just desserts. I had to laugh again when it becomes clear that the killer has thought of all of the escape avenues our heroes might want to pursue. Our heroine remembers the zip line team-building exercise as a potential escape late in the film only to discover, to her sorrow, that even that has been booby-trapped. There's no way out. The team-building exercises early in the film become either horrific parodies as the film unspools, or provide glimmers of hope our characters can grasp (usually in vain).

This is a film that doesn't look much like your standard slasher movies. Maybe it's because it's from Sweden, a country with both a twilight experience of the world for much of the year and with a twilight relationship with capitalism. Much of this film's mayhem is daylit, if you can call it that. Its visual register is amplified from a gloomy overcast, color corrected into an unpleasant pallor in places. It sets fewer of its violent set-pieces at night than any recent film I can remember, though what passes for daytime in this film is singularly gloomy. The actors are not your usual cast of young hot things, either. These actors are mundane in their looks even if the film draws their characters in deft strokes. You just know that Adam Lundgren's Jonas is a weasel at first sight, just as you just know that Katia Winter's Lina is practical enough to survive. None of the characters are redundant with one another. Maria Sid's Ingela is a recognizable office character from every viewer's workplace, the relentlessly positive go-getter who organizes secret Santa exchanges every year and shows up to the office at 6am because she's a morning person. You may know the type. I can't say I was sorry to see her horribly murdered. There's a fair amount of wish fulfillment in this movie, I think.

The variety of characters in this film marks it as distinct from your usual slasher film, too. It's not just the municipal workers who bear the brunt of the slasher's fury. He goes after everyone who might help them. The film also presents more than just attractive young people as protagonists, giving its middle-aged and senior characters more agency and more action than you expect in such a film. And while this film has a final girl character, she's ultimately not the center of the killer's fixation. It's capitalism and corruption that are his real target and in this regard, he wins. Not only does he avenge the motivating wrong done to him, he undoes the money motive for the film's ostensible victims and survivors. In so unraveling the bonds that hold these characters together, the killer exposes them as entirely deserving of their fates. This is a radical horror movie in which the dragons at the gates of Eden know that the rot must be expunged.

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