Tubi Tuesday: The Retreat (2021) – Morbidly Beautiful

“The Retreat” may follow familiar survival-horror beats, but its queer perspective, social critique, and satisfying vengeance are a thrill.

It’s Pride Month, and I’m on a mission to watch as many new-to-me queer horror movies as possible.

That can mean a lot of things. Films that put queer characters or stories front and center. Films written or directed by queer filmmakers. Films built around metaphors and themes that resonate deeply with the queer community. In rare cases, however, it means a film where queer identity is not just represented but essential, baked into the story so completely that the film simply would not work without it.

Fortunately, I found just such a film to kick off Pride Month, and it’s free to stream on Tubi.

The Retreat (2021), directed by Canadian filmmaker Pat Mills and written by Alyson Richards, is a lean, politically charged survival slasher that subverts the traditionally heteronormative conventions of backwoods horror.

The film centers on Renee (Tommie-Amber Pirie) and Valerie (Sarah Allen), a lesbian couple at a critical crossroads in their relationship. Renee is wrestling with commitment anxiety, and the two head out of the city for a weekend getaway at a secluded, gay-friendly bed-and-breakfast in the New York wilderness, hoping a change of scenery might help them find some solid footing.

When they arrive, however, their friends are inexplicably missing. What begins as a cozy retreat quickly becomes a nightmare when the couple realizes they are isolated, being watched, and eventually hunted by a highly organized group of extremist bigots who abduct LGBTQ+ tourists, torture them, and livestream their murders for profit.

It’s an ugly premise, but The Retreat is not interested in making its queer characters disposable victims.

The driving force behind the film is its direct response to the long, exhausting history of “Bury Your Gays” storytelling. Instead of using queer characters as expendable sidepieces, tragic lessons, or bodies dropped to move someone else’s story forward, Mills and Richards place Renee and Valerie firmly at the center of the narrative. They are not symbolic sacrifices. They are the heroes.

Better still, their love is not treated as a vulnerability. It is one of their greatest strengths.

Pirie and Allen bring real chemistry and agency to Renee and Valerie, which matters tremendously once the film locks into survival mode. I loved watching believable characters react quickly and intelligently instead of stumbling into every frustrating slasher mistake. They are scared, overwhelmed, and outmatched, but they are not helpless. Their fight-or-flight instincts kick in fast, and their devotion to each other gives the film its pulse.

The Retreat also taps into a very real anxiety for marginalized people traveling outside the perceived safety of more urban, visibly inclusive spaces. The film takes the idea of a “safe” queer-friendly haven and turns it into a trap.

That is the nightmare: not just that violence exists, but that sanctuary can be an illusion. Peace can vanish the moment someone else decides you do not belong.

That kind of fear gives the film more bite than its familiar survival-horror structure might otherwise allow.

Clocking in at a brisk 82 minutes, The Retreat does not waste much time.

It trims the excess, gets to the central conflict quickly, and keeps a strong race-against-time momentum once the hunt begins. It does not reinvent the survival slasher, and it doesn’t try to surprise at every turn. Most avid horror fans will easily recognize the shape of the thing. But it moves well, and there is real satisfaction in watching the women turn the tables on their tormentors.

That catharsis is one of the film’s greatest pleasures.

Mills keeps much of the graphic torture off-screen, a choice many will appreciate—especially those who loathe the ‘trauma as exploitation’ trope.The film never devolves into rape-revenge-style sadism or makes suffering the main attraction.

Instead, it saves its sharpest genre pleasures for the moments when Renee and Valerie begin fighting back. The third-act vengeance is twisted, justified, and wildly satisfying. One particularly gnarly creative kill with a nontraditional weapon had me downright giddy.

The final stretch is exhilarating in exactly the way you want a revenge fantasy to be.

It’s not perfect.

My biggest complaint is how hard it is to see so much of the action. The daytime photography is gorgeous, and the wooded Canadian landscape is a showstopper. But once the film moves into night scenes and dark interior spaces, visibility becomes a real problem. I was cranking up the brightness and squinting as hard as I could, and some scenes were still egregiously difficult to make out.

That is a real shame because this is otherwise a competently made film. It does not look cheap or lazy. But the visibility issue absolutely dampens the enjoyment during critical, intense moments.

When you watch, do yourself a favor and use the best screen possible. Get the room dark. Get the screen bright. It will help, but be prepared for a few frustrating stretches where the blackness gets in the way of the tension.

The villains are another area where the film may divide viewers. The militant antagonists are written as flat, one-note caricatures, defined almost entirely by their bigotry. They lack nuance or compelling motivation beyond hatred.

But I suspect that is intentional, and honestly, I respect it as a creative choice.

There is something smartly subversive about making the queer heroes complex and interesting while forcing the oppressors into a shallow, ugly box.

The monsters are superficial because blind hatred is superficial. They are not fascinating masterminds. They are not misunderstood. They are people who decided someone else was less human because someone, somewhere, taught them to think that way.

The film reinforces that through the faceless online community, watching the violence unfold. They may not be getting their hands bloody, but they are absolutely complicit. They are more than happy to consume cruelty as entertainment, cheering from a distance while pretending distance makes them clean.

That may be the most chilling part of The Retreat.

There is something deeply disturbing about watching someone show love and kindness to one person, then so easily dehumanize someone else. The horror is not a total absence of empathy. It is selective empathy. It is the ability to care, paired with the choice not to. Some people can look at others and see only something to hunt, abuse, humiliate, or erase simply because they are different.

That is staggering. And devastating.

Tonally, The Retreat walks a tricky line.

It is trying to be both a pointed social critique and a conventional wilderness cat-and-mouse thriller.

That balance will not work for everyone, especially viewers who bristle at overtly political horror. But for those who value horror as a space for marginalized voices, real-world fear, and righteous genre catharsis, there is a lot to admire here.

It works better as social critique than pure survival horror, not because it is not compelling or fun to watch. It is. But the survival beats themselves are fairly familiar. The film attempts to shake up the genre through perspective and purpose more than plot mechanics.

So, no,The Retreat does not reinvent the wheel. But it keeps the car smoothly on the road and makes the ride worth taking. Even without its refreshing representation, it is a solid watch for survival-horror fans.

With that representation, it becomes something more meaningful: a strong example of centering queer stories in a way that empowers rather than exploits.

It’s not perfect, but it works. And when it hits, it hits with one hell of a satisfying swing.

For Pride Month, it is hard to ask for a better Tubi discovery than a thoroughly watchable revenge fantasy about marginalized women refusing to become someone else’s cautionary tale.

Overall Rating (Out of 5 Butterflies): 3.5