The Conference

 With Halloween fast approaching, streaming platforms are battling it out to give viewers the best horror content possible – and The Conference on Netflix has caught people’s eyes.

I’ve long asserted that horror is rarely good if it doesn’t find a way to make you laugh, and director Patrik Eklund keeps his tongue in cheek and a bucket of fake blood on hand at all times. If you all have that one coworker who drives you nuts to the point where you’re inspired to fantasize about horrible things happening to them, this movie just might scratch that itch.

These people are creeps. Most of them, anyway. And none of them is the killer, because they’d rather ruin lives in indirect ways so death is a ripple effect – stabbing someone with a machete would just be too non-passive-aggressive for these dickheads. Who exactly am I talking about here? Retail developers, that’s who. They’re led by Ingela (Maria Sid), a greedy boss with a disingenuous smile, and her project manager toadie Jonas (Adam Lundgren), who’s like an eel in human form. They’ve migrated their team from the office to a van to a chunk of farmland in the middle of nowhere that’s the future location of a shopping mall, and Ingela brought her fancy gold-plated shovel for tomorrow’s big ceremonial groundbreaking. Hooray for capitalism and “progress,” right? Yeah, sure, whatever. 

At this point we should be grateful for sympathetic protagonists like Lina (Katia Winter), who’s back to work after extended sick leave and smelling something fishy with this project, and if you’re already guessing that the ick-whiff reeks like eel, well, you might be on to something. She looks at the contracts and sees her signature, but doesn’t remember signing. Considering the deal screws local farmers out of their land without compensating them for it, it’s not something she’d endorse. She might have an ally or two among her coworkers – it doesn’t sit quite right with Nadja (Bahar Pars) and Amir (Amed Bozan). Dopey-dope Kaj (Christoffer Nordenrot) kowtows to the bosses a bit. Eva (Eva Melander), Anette (Cecilia Nilsson) and Torbjorn (Claes Hartelius) are neither here nor there, coming off as people who just want to get through the day and collect their paycheck.

The group convenes at a remote “holiday village” with cabins in the woods and a nearby lake, and don’t say Camp Crystal Lake, beca- well, actually, go ahead and say it, because the homage is pretty damn obvious. They engage in a variety of cornball team-building exercises like sack races and terrifying trips down a zip line, and Jonas surprises everyone with a mall-mascot costume dubbed Sooty, complete with a big ugly grinning headpiece that looks like Pinocchio if he lived on the other side of the tunnel in Coraline. So, you’re no doubt thinking, when does the killing start? By the time Sooty arrives, it already has, but it doesn’t ratchet up until the killer puts on that disturbing-ass head, which looks so much better when it’s all grimy with blood.

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