‘The Conference’
This Swedish slasher, arriving on Netflix right on time for Halloween, is about one of the great horrors of modern life: work retreats. A group of municipal employees gather at a resort to get back in touch with nature, build team spirit and discuss plans for a controversial project that requires the appropriation of local farmland. The strained smiles of the leaders of the project — and their circular corporate-speak whenever any colleague raises ethical qualms — are sinister in their own way. But when the resort staff and guests are killed one by one in spectacularly disgusting fashion, the group’s ability to work together — and traverse zip-lines and make D.I.Y. rafts — acquires life and death stakes. The director Patrik Eklund crafts a lean thriller out of this premise, serving up sharp satire about corporate greed with a generous splattering of blood and gore.
‘Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation’
The premise of this Tunisian thriller by Youssef Chebbi is mesmerizing in its own right: In Tunis, a young detective, Fatma (Fatma Oussaifi) investigates a string of increasingly inexplicable cases of self-immolation. But historical context deepens the genre pleasures of “Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation” into a political parable. In 2010, a Tunisian street vendor lit himself afire in public to protest harassment by the authorities in a tragic spectacle that set off the Arab Spring. Taking inspiration from that moment, Chebbi crafts a beguiling take on the classic, hard-boiled police procedural. Many of his flourishes are familiar (though rendered with great visual originality), like the puzzle-solving detectives prowling an industrial urban landscape depicted in stark chiaroscuro. The mystery at the heart of the film, however, burns unquenchably: It illuminates no answers or evidence, but only a people’s blazing desire for self-determination.
