Called the world's first non-hearing thriller, Retreat is the feature debut of writer/director Ted Evans, and as those go, it's an ambitious one. After all, it's ambition isn't to just craft an functional thriller, which is difficult for even experienced directors, but to make it entirely on terms that most mainstream audiences are entirely unfamiliar to.
The results are a very mixed bag, but it's such a big swing that Retreat is worth watching just for the vision alone.
The setting is a remote English countryside manor called Chillmark, where an isolated community of deaf people have formed a kind of utopia; a safe haven away from a world that clearly has no interest in making things equal and safe for everyone.
Eva (Anne Zander) arrives to Chillmark under invite from the the defacto leader, Mia (Sophie Stone), to start a new life in a place that takes care of each other. She meets Matt (James Joseph Boyle), who was born and raised in Chillmark and has never seen or met anyone from the outside world. As Eva questions the way Chillmark works, it shatters Matt's perception of the community and sends them both on a tragic spiral as Mia's control begins to slip.
The first half of Retreat belongs to Eva while the latter is Matt's. The transition between the two comes abruptly, and it's entirely reliant on how you accept the change whether or not you'll stick with the film until the end.
Director Evans has a lot to say with huge themes baked in about community, societal hierarchy, trust, ableism, and even the foundations of language. It's not a surprise that not all of them fit together or that the script – adapted from his own short film – doesn't hold together. The final act, in particular, is frustratingly predictable, as Retreat falls for every trope it had so deftly avoided in the first half.
But there's a lot to love before it falls apart. Evans directs wonderful performances out of his cast, and because much of the film is entirely without dialog, it forces us as viewers to pay attention to the body language and facial expressions of the performers. Yes, there are subtitles, but there's also a lot that goes unsaid, and it's especially in the soulful performances from Zander and Boyle that Retreat finds something truly special.
Evans also smartly understands how to play with the expectations of modern audiences, who are so used to audio cues to tell us them how to feel. In a way, I kind of wish he'll be more daring in the future with this. It is communicating that experience which comes through strongest, and there discussions between Zander and Boyle regarding their visions of a perfect world are the most melancholy and intriguing in the entire film.
At 107 minutes in length, Retreat is frustratingly sluggish in pacing. It could do with a strong, brutal trim of an easy 20 minutes without losing anything but excess. It's not that the material itself isn't interesting, it's just that in playing with a larger canvas than a short film, Evans loses the precision that makes for the best thrills.
For a moment, during an early raid completed entirely in silence, Retreat lives up to that promise. But based on the way Evans moves his skilled cast and stages his scenes, I doubt it will be the last time.
