[Film Review] The Retreat (2021) Enacts Gruesome Queer Catharsis

Every time there’s a horror movie about city slickers who take an ill-fated trip to the countryside, there has to be fucked-up deer imagery. Once you see the gnarly mangled deer corpse, you can buckle up for the ride. The Retreat leans into this image more so than many other horror films, and in doing so sets up maybe the greatest thematic bait and switch in contemporary horror.

To briefly explain, the film revolves around a queer couple who are attempting to meet their friends, also explicitly queer, at an AirBnB cabin for a weekend getaway and celebration. The locals, in time-honored horror tradition, don’t take kindly to new people showing up in their space, and decide to voice this by committing hate crimes. While it would have been exceedingly easy for the film to slip into yet another showcase of queer pain for cishet folks to clutch their pearls about, Alyson Richard’s screenplay veers the film solidly away from any kind of “bury your gays” trope, even though death happens aplenty. Instead, the film turns the trope of queer suffering for suffering’s sake on its head and has the viewer asking: who are the hunters and who is the hunted?

While the film does not ever veer into voyeurism for queer pain, that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in gore. There are a few very well-shot deaths (a notable one including an old CRT monitor) that really bring home that this movie is about pain, but it’s never going to punch down. While I’m normally wary of getting fully on board with the concept of “earned death” in horror films, you can’t help but feel like each spectacle of death and which deaths happen off-camera make a statement about valuing when death serves something other than making the audience squirm. In the case of this film, each death very clearly serves the goal of delivering queer catharsis: of letting queer women in particular see archetypes of people who have hurt them (reactionary conservatives, complacent straight white women) get their comeuppance.

Director Pat Mill pays homage to slashers past with an absolutely smoldering beginning that isn’t a slow burn but feels like one in the absolute best way: I was viscerally reminded of how most of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was just an increasingly uncomfortable teens-on-a-roadtrip story, before Leatherface really becomes a thing in the third act. But despite this feel at the beginning, the film moves at an absolutely breakneck pace, with its eighty -minute runtime leaving you a little breathless at the film’s conclusion. The direction and cinematography also lean heavily into classic scares that linger, rather than having ever-present jumps. There are visual scares – figures appearing in the background are done particularly well – but there are essentially no red herring jump scares, so every moment of tension builds to the final action sequence.

In terms of performances, there are a few standouts. Tommie-Amber Pirie as Renee, one of the queer women being tormented, has an incredible ability to demonstrate the growth of her character from acommitment-phobic burnout to someone willing to stick her neck out for the people she cares about, no mean feat in eighty-ish minutes. The other standout is Celina Sinden, who plays Layna, the wife of the primary antagonist, who not only aids and abets the murder of queer people but who actively takes up her husband’s bigoted cause to maintain the status quo. The scenes between Pirie and Sinden, with Sinden enacting some hard-hitting white female toxicity where she initially attempts to get Pirie’s character to view her as a savior figure, are squirm-worthy in their realism. 

Practically, the film is very familiar with the constraints of its own production values and works within them as subtly as possible. There are a few artful cutaways during what the audience assumes is a brutal kill, but which kills are shown and which aren’t also serve the themes in addition to keeping the practical effects budget down. And the kills they do show are very well done; the gore isn’t over the top, but is… pleasing? If gore is your thing.

Overall, The Retreat is a fun queer take on the slasher that serves as both commentary and catharsis. It subverts the expectation of much media that to be queer is to suffer and die by empowering queer folks to be more than victims. In doing so, some of its imagery and characterization can be kind of on the nose – as a queer person who grew up in a rural hunting community similar to the one in the film, I found my nose wrinkling a tad at some of the depictions of hick reactionary conservatives, but I also recognize that queer people’s mileage of life in insular communities will vary wildly. But the fucked-up deer ultimately did not deceive me, and I had a wonderful time with this film.

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