Konferensen

Plot

A team-building conference for municipal employees turns into a nightmare when accusations of corruption begin to circulate and plague the work environment. At the same time, a mysterious figure begins murdering the participants.

Cast

Unfamiliar

Verdict

Slasher is a sub-genre I grew up with but honestly was never very enamored with. Give me monsters, zombies, vampires, something psychological but a person in a mask running around being all stabby stabby? Meh.

This Swedish stab at the genre has a couple of things going for it, the killer looks fantastic and the ensemble of characters is varied and much appreciated in a world of generic 20 something pretty people type films.

However, that's mostly it. The whole film is played very safe and doesn't bring much to the table you won't have seen a hundred times before.

It's not bad, but if you've watched many slashers you'll have pretty much seen this.

Rants

I recently watched one of the new Scream movies, you had characters stabbed 20+ times, people stabbed had the knife pulled up through their innards, people smashed in the head with bricks and then 5 4 3 2 1 they're up, running, fighting, chatting as if it never happened. Slasher shouldn't be a genre you can't take seriously and the modern king of slashers should be taking it more seriously. Absurd, laughable and as believable as Roadrunner vs Coyote in it's approach. Can't wait for an anvil to drop on a characters head in the next Scream movie and them to walk it off.

Breakdown

Great mix of characters Solid killer appearance.

Mediocre overall Instantly forgettable.

Ever noticed how, in horror films, co-workers are always portrayed as loathsome and egocentric people that passionately hate each other? And especially when they're away on a retreat or team-building activity together? I think screenwriters do this deliberately to show "ordinary" people who work in offices and watch horror movies to relax - like me - that we don't have to complain about our own colleagues, after all.

The Swedish "Konferensen" is very similar to the British "Severance". In both films, fellow office workers, who can't stand each other, are taken out of their comfort zones to participate, very much against their will, in forced team-building activities somewhere in a remote location. The films also have in common they are both very light-hearted slashers without too much significance, but very entertaining, nevertheless.

In "Konferensen" we have the administrative employees and project-developers of a rural municipality who are obliged to spend a few days in a sort of boot camp, and at the same time celebrate their great recent achievement; - namely the building of a large shopping center on the grounds where a large, expropriated farm used to be. Lina, who has been absent for a few months due to a burnout, discovers that the over-ambitious Jonas has been falsifying permits and cheating landowners. There is also talk of leases for the new shopping center that don't seem to exist, such as IKEA. Can you imagine a shopping zone in Sweden without an IKEA?

When referring to farmers who were forcibly expropriated, you also know that you don't have to guess long for the identity of the bloodthirsty killer who soon starts butchering the participants one by one, whilst putting on the idiotic mask of the project mascot. It is also not the intention or ambition of writer/director Patrik Eklund to bring forward an original and incredibly intelligent horror film. He clearly just had a pitch-black comedy with a lot of blood, creative kills, and a bit of suspense in mind. He succeeds with "Konferensen".

Yet another masked killer horror. What with the recent ok-ish Totally Killer, and the upcoming Eli Roth directed Thanksgiving, they seem to be all the rage . . . . again! The Conference takes the Totally Killer route with it being a comedy too, however the tone switch between comedy and horror is handled better here, and isn't as jarring. This is chock full of the usual horror tropes, with a group of people, some you hope survive, some you hope meet a grizzly end and of course when the killer strikes, the deaths are wonderfully gruesome. This is a fun Swedish horror that should rocket to the top of the Netflix Top 10 list.

The title refers to my home country across the bay. In Finland, the quality of films and series still varies to an unfortunate extent, and in many areas we seem to have difficulty in exploiting our own strengths. The Swedes, on the other hand, know how to make films of guaranteed quality in every genre.

I'm not a fan of this genre myself, but this film was quite entertaining. Great actors and the ability to laugh at the silly aspects of Swedishness as seen from Finland - of course, it seemed that the filmmakers also understood the silly aspects of Swedishness.

From a Finnish perspective, the characters were quite relatable and also the municipal politics. The film also touched on the pain points of Swedish society, but only very briefly. There was no real message, and I don't think anyone expects that from a film of this genre.

In the spirit of neighbourly love, it was implied that one of the main characters (Ingela) was of Finnish background. Ingela was, of course, a rather unpleasant person. En finne igen! Thanks for this, Sweden ;)

All in all, however, the film was a very traditional slasher film. I don't like this kind of movies. However, this was more entertaining than average in this genre.

The Conference is polluted with a cast of deeply unlikable characters who get exactly what is coming to them. Though not without subtlety (a few of the good people are sacrificed along the way) this is essentially a satisfying vengeance film for people who hate corporate shills and the jerks who are destroying the environment.

The violence is genuinely disturbing so I wouldn't recommend this as a light watch if you're in the mood to just laugh, but there are a few undeniably hilarious scenes. Konferensen is primarily driven by a lot of schadenfreude.

This is also one of those flicks where you can somewhat sympathize with the killer even though they're completely out of line by the end.