Retreat

CinemaSerf6/10

May 31, 2025

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It would probably take an event of global significance for me to ever end up boarded up in a remote island house with Jamie Bell and Cillian Murphy but Thandie Newton is obviously much harder to please in this disappointing apocalyptic thriller. “Kate” is married to “Martin” (Murphy) and they have taken refuge far from the madding crowd to get over some sort of family disaster which she appears to hold him responsible for. With the storm clouds gathering - both metaphorical and physical, and their generator playing up, the couple are barely speaking when she spots a body nearby. Racing to the scene they discover the blood-soaked “Jack” (Bell) who looks like he has seen better days. Indoors and recovered a little, he regales them with a story of grim disaster on the mainland and insists that they hole up for the duration. Sceptical, they soon find themselves more hostages than partners - but is he telling them the truth, or has he more malevolent designs? This starts off weakly but for about fifteen minutes there’s a degree of menace as the plot establishes itself and a sense of frenzy starts to emerge, especially from “Kate”, but then the story takes a few silly twists and takes us back to square one. The low-powered audio mix doesn’t help it much either as half the time what dialogue there is is hard to make out, and I’m afraid that tempting as this incarceration might have been at the start of the film, it rather lost it’s lustre as the thing just ran out of steam. I did quite like the denouement, but it could have come half an a hour earlier and spared us wading through what is a really pretty pointless film.