A father and son share an emotionally fraught mountain holiday in Retreat, a coming-of-age drama with disquieting thriller elements and a steady background hum of apocalyptic dread that feels depressingly timely. The feature debut of Swiss writer-director Leon Schwitter, this tense two-hander riffs on the creepy visual grammar of genre cinema but ultimately opts to stay firmly in the understated art-house zone, dropping too many teasingly dark hints that never quite pay off. All the same, this is a meticulously crafted and impressively mature debut from a young film-maker still in his twenties, with a suspense-heavy plot and universal themes that should help boost its international appeal. It will screen in competition at back-to-back premieres at both Mar Del Plata and Thessaloniki film festivals over the coming week.
Middle-aged dad Michael (Peter Hottinger) and his pre-teen son Benny (Dorian Heiniger) arrive at their remote alpine cabin for a rare bonding trip. While the magnificent landscape seems to offer a soul-soothing, healing uplift, the duo’s awkward conversations hint at a painful back story of divorce and estrangement. There is warmth and tenderness between them, but with a streak of low-level threat and latent conflict. Michael has an ominously well-stocked arsenal of shotguns, and delights in teaching Benny to blast targets in the woods. He also has gas masks and enough food supplies to last months or even years, a strong suggestion he is planning for some kind of cataclysmic event.
As Michael’s controlling behaviour becomes more pronounced in the cabin, he bans Benny from using his phone or trying to contact the outside world. Eventually he breaks the news that the boy will not be returning to school after their holiday, as planned. “They don’t teach you the important things in life anyway”, he shrugs. When he realises he is effectively being held prisoner, a wily, defiant Benny hatches a plan to escape alone through the snowy fores, But his father’s passive-aggressive manipulations and the unforgiving winter terrain prove to be more daunting obstacles than he expected.
Retreat never fully clarifies whether we are witnessing an abduction, a mental breakdown, a bitter post-divorce custody battle, a survivalist plan to withdraw from a doomed human race, or perhaps even a domestic terror plot in the making. Having woven an intricate web of creeping unease and mounting tension, Schwitter ultimately settles for an open-ended finale that leaves many questions dangling.
On the one hand, there is something commendable in this refusal to play to thriller conventions, almost chastising the viewer for expecting some kind of cathartic crescendo of violence. Arguably this opacity is also unavoidable given that we are viewing these events through Benny’s eyes, and the mysteries of psychologically damaged adult behaviour are often indecipherable to children. But this low-key non-twist also feels needlessly cryptic and a little deflating as drama.
Retreat is a disaster movie where the big catastrophe never arrives but a smaller, more intimate tragedy has already happened to this broken, dysfunctional family. Incidentally, we might quibble with the film’s slightly misleading English-language title. The French original Réduit is much closer to “redoubt”, traditionally a heavily armed fortress intended for a sustained defence against enemy invasion. Indeed, Switzerland first established a “Réduit National” in the late 19th century, a line of bunker-like fortifications running through the Alps, many of which still survive today. Schwitter shot his film close to this line, and references it in his press statements, claiming “the myth of the mountains as a place of retreat is deeply rooted in Swiss history”. This local allusion, with its accompanying subtext of paranoid anxiety towards outsiders, will be lost on most foreign audiences.
In its favour, Retreat is a polished and visually appealing work, rooted in two authentic-feeling performances and a compelling narrative driven more by charged silences than by its thinly scattered dialogue. Schwitter and his aptly named cinematographer Robin Angst create an eye-pleasing, nerve-jangling collage effect by contrasting small and large details, mist-wreathed valleys juxtaposed with closely observed ant colonies, towering glaciers with wind-rustled leaves, and so on. They also creatively play with depth of field in places, setting fuzzy foreground figures against a sharply focussed backdrop. The spare soundtrack, largely stripped of music aside from a few diegetic bursts and moody sonic shadings, accentuates the film’s defining motifs of silence and solitude, austere storytelling clothed in wintry beauty.
Director: Leon Schwitter
Screenplay: Leon Schwitter, Michael Karrer
Cast: Peter Hottinger, Dorian Heiniger
Cinematography: Robin Angst
Editing: Michael Karrer
Music: Hora Lunga
Producers: Caroline Hepting, Rea Televantos, Leon Schwitter, Michael Karrer
Production companies: Exit Filmkollektiv (Switzerland), Sabotage Kollektiv (Switzerland)
World sales: Alief
Venue: Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Film Forward Competition)
In German
82 minutes
