Get ready for some intense competency development.
The Conference (org. Konferensen) is a Swedish slasher horror movie. It was directed and co-written by Patrik Eklund (the other writer being Thomas Moldestad) based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Mats Strandberg (writer of The End and co-writer of The Circle). It was produced by Netflix and the Swedish media company SF Studios.
Ahead of the ground-breaking of a brand new shopping mall, a group of workers from the Kolarängen municipality go to a remote retreat on an island in a lake for some team-building exercises and celebrating. However, a lot of friction builds up within the team because of concerns about the project and clashes of personality. All the while an unseen figure is sneaking around the island and surrounding woods, setting traps, cutting everyone off from the outside world and killing people, all in preparation for a bigger killing spree. Now stuck with the killer, the municipal workers have to make their stand and survive the night.
The cast is:
- Katia Winter as Lina
- Adam Lundgren as Jonas
- Eva Melander as Eva
- Bahar Pars as Nadja
- Amed Bozan as Amir
- Maria Sid as Ingela, the boss of the municipal workers
- Christoffer Nordenrot as Kaj
- Claes Hartelius as Torbjörn
- Lola Zackow as Jenny, the owner of the retreat
- Marie Agerhäll as Cleo, the team-building instructor
- Jimmy Lindström as Karl, the retreat's cook
- Martin Lagos as Roger, the retreat's handyman
- Robert Follin as Sotis, the masked killer
The movie premiered on Netflix on October 13, 2023 (Friday the 13th of that year).
Tropes
- Anti-Villain: The killer is the son of the farmer whose land was taken from him for the mall project and killed himself out of grief, and is committing his murders out of revenge. However, he also kills all the retreat's employees, which proves he doesn't care about collateral damage.
- Anyone Can Die: Lina, Eva, Nadja, and Torbjörn are the only ones left alive by the film's end.
- Asshole Victim: Jonas is so despicable down to attacking Lina at the very end for no reason but spite, you don't feel bad for him being graphically scalped by her.
- Audience Surrogate: Nadja is this to a lesser extent; she is a fairly new hire to the municipality, which allows the movie to have her ask questions the other characters might know, but the audience doesn't.
- Bad Boss: While not necessarily incompetent, Ingela is generally not sympathetic to the concerns or feelings of her employees and dismisses their misgivings about the mall, seeing it as a "greater good" deal for the municipality even if the project isn't exactly above board.
- Blackmail: A heroic example: having saved proof of Jonas' crimes on a flash drive, Lina gives him an ultimatum: either come clean about how bad a deal the shopping mall is, or she goes to the police.
- Bludgeoned to Death: Sotis kills Cleo with a big, two-handed hammer taken from the display of old tools.
- Brief Accent Imitation: When talking about Ingela and repeating things she has said, Lina and Amir both jokingly imitate her Finnish accent in one scene.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- The raft the group builds during a team-building exercise is used by Lina and Jonas during the nighttime rampage in an attempt to escape the island.
- The zipline, used during another team-building exercise, is later used by Lina and Amir to cross the lake.
- The gold-painted shovel, meant to be used in the mall's ground-breaking ceremony, is used to decapitate the killer in the climax.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Eva smokes throughout the movie, even during the killer's rampage.
- Cool Old Guy: Despite his old age, Torbjörn puts up a hell of a fight against the killer towards the end and survives the events of the film thanks to Eva assisting him and Nadja decapitating the killer.
- Cringe Comedy:
- The municipal commercial video is in hilariously bad taste, villifying minorities by only having them appear as gang members with everyone else in the video being white and almost all of them blonde; Nadja even jokingly asks if it was produced by Nordfront (the online publication of a Nordic white supremacist movement). And that's not even getting into how fake the presentation feels, with terrible ADR and sound designs.
- A lot of humor surrounding Kaj comes from him trying to be hip and cool and failing utterly.
- Cryptic Background Reference: While arguing with Nadja about the ethics of going ahead with the construction of the mall, Ingela talks about not wanting "another Frans incident". Nadja doesn't know what she means (due to being new to working for the municipality); when she asks, Ingela just walks away. It's later revealed that she was referring to when, while the mall project was in development, Frans, who worked on assessing the environmental impact of the mall, snapped from the stress and stabbed her in the shoulder with a pen.
- Cut Phone Lines: A more modern example: the killer destroys the retreat's wi-fi router. Since he has also taken everyone's phones away after Cleo confiscated them for the team-building, everyone is effectively cut off.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Downplayed, but Lina has only recently returned to work after having been on sick leave due to stress, and she is still fairly sensitive because of it.
- Dead Guy on Display: Ingela is killed by being hung by the neck from a flagpole, and is left hanging there for the rest of the night.
- Dirty Coward: When the killer closes in, Jonas wastes no time in leaving everyone else high and dry, even Anette, after she helped treat his scalp injury and get the motorcycle running.
- Driven to Suicide: Pålsson, the farmer who owned the land the mall is being built on is revealed to have hung himself in his barn after the municipality somehow seized his land from him.
- Elder Employee: Torbjörn is the oldest employee in the group and likes to talk about how different things were in his days. Anette and Eva are also fairly old, though a bit younger than him.
- False Friend: Jonas spends a lot of time with Kaj despite their many differences, but it's hinted early that he is only using him.
- Foreshadowing:
- Early in the film, while the killer is preparing for the attack, a hare can be seen killed by a bear trap. Later in the film, Nadja gets stuck in another bear trap, but manages to get out.
- When picking up a chainsaw, Eva worries about it not having gasoline. Later, when the killer uses it to break through a door, her concern turns out to have been valid, with the chainsaw running out of fuel while he is using it.
- Gaslighting: When Lina keeps questioning how her signature might have appeared on documents she has no memory of signing and would not have signed, Jonas tries to convince her that she did sign them and just forgot about it because of her stress. It later becomes clear that he and some other less scrupulous municipal workers faked her signatures to make the deal happen.
- Guilt by Association: The retreat and its staff members helped promote the mall publicly, which apparently makes them just as fair game for the killer as the municipal workers who are getting it built.
- Hate Sink: Jonas does his utter best to make you despise him long before he reveals his fraud scheme.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Seeing the sharp wooden spikes coming while he and Lina are on the zipline, Amir turns them around so he will be hit with them first to help Lina's chances of surviving, which she does thanks to him.
- How We Got Here: The movie opens in the morning after everyone got to the retreat. The camera pans all over the trashed, bloodied conference room as credits appear in the foreground, finally looking out a smashed window and showing the burning van, with screams in the background. The movie then cuts back in time to everyone going to the retreat.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Amir is impaled by several sharp sticks the killer set up on the other end of the zipline as a trap for people who thought to flee that way.
- Implacable Man: Sotis suffers quite a few injuries throughout the night and, apart from one scene where he has to patch himself up, is still relentless.
- Improvised Weapon: Sotis kills Kaj in the hot tub by wielding a loose, live outboard motor like a chainsaw.
- It's All About Me: Jonas has a massive ego, seeing the mall project mainly as an opportunity for him to make himself look good. Which makes sense when you consider that he has been conspiring with a big corporation to gain them the land the mall is to be built on and has been defrauding all of the municipal workers.
- Malevolent Masked Men: The killer wears the mask of the Sotis costume that Jonas brought to the retreat. He initially goes without a mask and only starts wearing it when he stumbles upon it while taking away the group's cell phones.
- Mascot: Sotis (roughly translated "Sooty") is a character created by the municipality meant to represent the new mall. He is meant to be an old charcoal burner (a "kolare" in Swedish), people who in the old days lived and worked in the woods, manning and supervising charcoal piles.
- Meaningful Background Event: In one shot, Eva stands on the porch of her cabin smoking while the killer can be seen moving from behind the cabin to the next in the background.
- The Mole: Jonas turns out to have been in a secret agreement with Backmann-Kroon, a private corporation. He has been faking everything about the mall deal, lying about businesses signing up for it, in order to get Backmann-Kroon the land the mall will be built on cheaply in exchange for a highly-paying job for them when the project falls through.
- Not Quite Dead:
- Nadja disappears for bit during the climax, hinting that she died. However, she turns up in the eleventh hour and deals the killing blow to Sotis.
- In a bit of a twist for a slasher movie, it does't happen with Sotis, but with Jonas as one final scare. Having apparently died when he drove a motorcycle off the bridge, he pops up again upon finding Lina and tries to kill her out of petty revenge.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: While the movie also uses plenty of modern pop and rock music, it also uses a fair amount of classical music for its soundtrack.
- The Quiet One: For some reason, the killer never speaks or makes much of a sound even when he is badly injured.
- Razor Floss: The killer sets up thin wires between trees before beginning his rampage for real; the wires become very hard to see in the dark and one of them cuts through the skin of Jonas' scalp when he runs into it.
- Red Herring: For the first half of the movie, the killer is implied to be Frans, a municipal employee who did the environmental assessment for the mall project, snapped when it went ahead against recommendations and stabbed Ingela with a pen. When he is unmasked, he turns out to be the son of the farmer who owned the land the mall is being built on, and Frans apparently had nothing to do with the killings.
- Shout-Out: While sitting in the hot tub, Jonas and Kaj re-enact the chest-thumping humming scene from The Wolf of Wall Street.
- Sinister Scythe: Anette is killed by an old sickle to the head.
- Skewed Priorities: The team-building exercise where the workers make plans for escaping a hypothetical sinking ship, Jonas and Anette both display this:
- Jonas says the first thing he would bring is his laptop; while it might be useful under normal circumstances, everyone points out to him that it certainly won't be very valuable in an urgent survival situation.
- Anette is more concerned with the environmental impact of the ship sinking and leaking oil into the ocean. While this is a valid concern, there isn't anything they would be able to do about while escaping the ship.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The gory, bloody death of Kaj in the hot tub is set to "Om" by Niklas Strömstedt, a passionate romantic pop song from the early 90s.
- Took a Level in Badass: All of the survivors done so by the end, but especially Eva who was the most scared of them all, only for her to return to save Torbjörn and actively fighting the killer together.
- Trail of Blood: Cleo first finds one belonging to Kelly and finds her hung on a meathook in the freezer, then Ingela later finds Cleo's bloodtrail but stops and runs when she sees some of Cleo's teeth instead of following it all the way.
- Unwitting Pawn: Kaj was duped into helping Jonas scam the municipality for the mall's plot of land, having been promised a job at Backmann-Kroon as well.
- We Can Rule Together: When Lina confronts Jonas with proof of his shady dealings, he tries to win her over with promises of a new, better paying job. She doesn't buy it.
- Wham Line: When Anette unmasks the killer:Anette: You're not Frans...
