Summary: Silent Retreat is worth watching. Great cinematography and suspenseful, well-told story, as well as its exploration of the double, elevate this film a bit above the average.
Silent Retreat is directed by Ace Jordan, written by Jordan and Heather Smith, produced by Starko Entertainment, and was released to VOD and DVD on January 12, 2016.
Shot in a beautiful location on Big Bear Lake in California, Silent Retreat follows a group of media employees who head into the woods for a weekend retreat. They soon discover that the lodge they’re staying in was, not too long ago, a psychiatric hospital. And then the retreat participants start unaccountably disappearing.
I was definitely engaged by Silent Retreat, but I have to say up front that it has some significant problems. The writing (specifically the dialogue) was not great and neither, unfortunately, was the acting, which seemed generally to be of daytime-soap-opera quality. And as much as the story itself was one of the film’s strengths, I did see the big reveal (that is, the identity of the killer) coming from at least the middle of the film.
