By Robert Scucci
| Published
If you’ve never taken a look at any of Netflix’s international offerings, you’re doing yourself an incredible disservice. While I’ve always been a fan of subtitles for their ability to make various murmurings more pronounced, you have the option to stream 2023’s The Conference, a Swedish language film, with English dubs if you don’t like blocks of text taking up your screen. Slasher comedies come in many different flavors, and The Conference is so satisfying if you’ve ever had to go on a work retreat with a bunch of people you wouldn’t be caught dead with outside of work.
Fortunately, for almost everybody involved, their trip gets cut short because they’re one team-building exercise away from getting brutally disemboweled by a corporate mascot that looks like he’s having just a little too much fun with his victims.
The Dreaded Work Retreat
The Conference boasts a premise that will be familiar to you if you’ve ever had to go on a dreaded weekend work trip to participate in a bunch of manufactured fun in the form of team-building exercises.
When a group of municipal workers head out to a rural community to celebrate the recent acquisition of farm land that they plan to bulldoze in favor of erecting a new shopping center, tensions are already at an all-time high. Jonas (Adam Lundgren), who’s spearheading the project, constantly undermines Lina (Katia Winter), who recently returned from a leave of absence due to work-related burnout. While attending the conference, Lina and Jonas butt heads because she has reason to believe that he forged her signatures on a number of crucial documents while she wasn’t present, resulting in a number of back-handed, exploitative real estate practices.
While the whole point of the conference is to get everybody to know each other a little better, everybody’s true colors start to seep through their veneer of corporate doublespeak and professional niceties when their working weekend starts to go off the rails.
Pin The Fraud On The Jonas
Their rivalry continues to escalate in The Conference when Lina discovers that Jonas essentially forced a farmer out of his home and ruined his life, driving him to suicide. It’s around this time that everybody at the retreat starts to meet their fate, as a psychopath dressed like their own corporate mascot starts sabotaging their weekend by brutally killing everybody involved in the municipal project.
While the kills are absolutely unhinged and over-the-top in The Conference, you need to be reassured that this film is actually hilarious. The look of horror on the employee’s faces when they find their boss’s corpse hanging from a flagpole is nearly identical to their grimaces when they find out the campsite’s cook is missing (read: dead), and they have to spend their weekend eating hot dogs instead of having proper catering.
And if you’ve ever had the displeasure of ziplining (it’s exactly like the South Park episode) with a group of people who you only act nice to because you’re paid to keep things cordial in a work setting, you’ll be thrilled to know that the masked killer has a few tricks up his sleeve involving the reconfiguring of each and every team-building exercise into booby traps as if he were Kevin McCallister.
Streaming The Conference
The Conference is your typical comedy slasher done to perfection. The masked killer’s identity remains a mystery well into the third act even though his motive is clearly revenge. What’s more, most of the people he’s exterminating aren’t exactly sympathetic characters, so you can just sit back and enjoy the bloodbath while rooting for Lina, who’s an innocent victim of Jonas’ criminal negligence.
If you’re looking for gore with humor, infuriating corporate jargon mixed with slasher tropes, and one of the most badass final girls fighting for her life while lively classical music dominates the sonic backdrop, then you can stream The Conference on Netflix.
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