This Swedish production, ranging from black comedy to bloody horror, has become another global Netflix phenomenon, although its artistic result falls short of this success.
Conference (Conference/Conference, Sweden/2023). Director: Patrick Eklund. Screenplay: Thomas Moldestad and Patrick Eklund, based on the novel by Mats Strandberg. Cast: Katya Winter, Adam Lundgren, Maria Syed, Lola Zako, Bahar Pars, Eva Meander, Mary Agirhal, Cecilia Nelson and Amed Buzan. Cinematographer: Simon Rudholm. Editor: Robert Krantz. Composer: Andreas Tengblad. Running time: 95 minutes. Available on Netflix.
The address is ConferenceBut it can easily be “camp” or “retreat”. Although there are no tents or guitar playing around the campfire, the place where a group of public servants travel has plenty of greenery and several cabins where they will spend two nights with the idea of ironing the rough edges in the face of a shopping center development that will be implemented by the government district to which they belong on the property.
Everything starts as if it were a cross from Office with White Lotus. From the first, the idea is taken through a set of characters-infused characters – starting with the manager, the optimist who seems to have swallowed every driving course circulating on YouTube – and united under the roof of the work itself. The second, confinement of actions to prior recreational terrain from which they cannot get out and the certainty that there will be a bloodbath, as the opening scene paves well. That comic spirit continues until a masked, bloodthirsty man arrives.
One by one, the members of the group will fall, in the sequence of murders shown by director Patrick Eklund without worrying too much about building some ominous atmosphere: unlike nine out of ten horror films, where the victim can be in danger for a good few minutes, here the killer appears, does his job and continues on his way. Hardly any fear can be born in this way, although the reality is that Conference It also does not have a compass indicating the sex of the viscera, behind the hectoliter of blood that floods the screen.
Where is he headed? To different aspects: towards social and economic criticism at times, towards gruesome comedy in others, towards meta-rhetoric at times and towards the practice of survival in its final phase. Because the film Eklund is one of those who want to be many and end up being nothing, because it remains on the surface of everything.
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