SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Residing on a remote island for peace and quiet, a couple are interrupted by a stranger who claims that a virus has been unleashed. He attempts to convince the couple to barricade themselves in, but with this comes a struggle for power and control. Is the stranger telling the truth? Obviously that question is the purpose of the film, and it is explored thoroughly. Paranoia is an easy trait to use in psychological thrillers, we've seen it multiple times. Retreat is no different, but the scale feels far more personal and thus results in a more affecting story. You feel emotionally invested with the couple who clearly have no choice but to believe the stranger to prevent themselves getting harmed. But aside from that, they are also going through their own personal troubles which assists in making them more relatable. The first act sets this up excellently, watching a couple struggle to find what they once had together. Acting was solid from Cillian Murphy and Thandie Newton, however I do not believe there was much chemistry between them. They didn't really suit each other. Jamie Bell playing the elusive stranger was excellent. Both menacing and mysterious. What are his true motives? The drama and suspense was well crafted and it certainly is enjoyable to watch. The ending...well, it happens. I personally did not like it, but it's an ending atleast. The production occasionally feels like a British TV show. By that, I mean the direction feels rather simple and clinical. Nothing outstanding or memorable. It's like watching Broadchurch or Happy Valley (literally the first two shows that come to mind). The location of a remote island was a clever choice for enhancing the feeling of being trapped and lonely. So whilst Retreat is absolutely fine to watch and does contain some thrilling performances, it's just underwhelming and feels all too familiar. But Cillian Murphy...the guy is underrated!

As a Brit, i rarely watch British movies due to my personal taste of simply disliking them, but 'Retreat' is a rare exception. The main plot is catchy and i'm glad i gave this film a chance. 'Retreat' has great performances, very good directing along with a nice film score. The bad guy became a bad guy by circumstance. The film becomes an issue of if he can be trusted or not. The husband and wife characters don't know whether they can trust him / whether this guy is paranoid and crazy or whether he's telling them the truth, the viewers are made to relate to these husband and wife characters due to the movie doing a very good job of keeping the audience in the dark as well.'Retreat' is a very tense thriller with a minimal cast, there should be more movies like this with a great plot and with literally only a few characters, films like this are proof that a movie doesn't need to have a big number cast to make a film great.The only thing that is wrong with this flick is a couple of comments of sexism coming from the bad guy "Jack", example - when he tells the husband that they can't allow the woman to make all the decisions, and the scene where he puts food out and tells her to make him breakfast, when he can easily make it himself (but then again that particular scene was a means to an end for that moment, it was set up to simply build a tense outcome, but still they could have done that outcome in a different way without the sexism).'Retreat' has quite a few plot-twists and the very end scene is shocking and unexpected.If you like thrillers, i recommend renting this film on Amazon Prime Video.

Martin, Kate, Jack - Retreat doesn't need many more characters to play with the audience's emotions. Jamie Bell' performance is outstanding. Jack's behavior triggers many emotions and Jamie does an excellent job delivering Jack's fierce and intense lines and actions. I have to admit Martin's personality is quite difficult to grasp. As Retreat doesn't contain much dialog, it's a challenge at times to understand what he feels and why he reacts the way he does. Don't get me wrong, I liked Cillian's performance, but I couldn't care that much for Martin. His character develops in leaps I can't comprehend sometimes. Whereas Jack literally penetrates my mind, Martin appears hollow and indifferent. Thandie Newton is awesome, although in the beginning I wasn't sure if I truly like her. She develops nicely though and turns out to be much stronger than one might guess. Retreat is a psychological thriller and succeeds in keeping your mind busy. It doesn't feel like an actual movie though; it rather feels like a play. Thus I wouldn't recommend it to people who seek action and entertainment.

Picture this: you're on a lone island, when out-of-the-blue a bloodied, exhausted, armed uniformed man appears. He says he needs to BOARD UP your whole house because there is a world-wide airborne plague that's killing everyone. So this virus… is it a foot long then? Perhaps he'd mistaken the virus for a large winged badger. It must be the largest virus ever found on Earth, about one hundred trillion billion times bigger than all the others combined, because it is evidently so enormous that it's incapable of passing through 3-inch gaps. So OBVIOUSLY the soldier must be lying. Right? Certainly you'd expect an educated couple – a journalist and an architect – to be at least half-way acquainted with Contagion 101 and Biology For Total Dummies to immediately question this stranger: "Oy, you: how the bloody heck do you expect to prevent an airborne virus from spreading by boarding up windows and doors? We breathe that bloody air, don't we? And as long as we have fresh air in the house that means some of that contaminated air is passing through. It's not as if only uncontaminated air molecules can slip through those openings… You bloody silly liar."Then again, I forget: journalists aren't the brightest cookies on this planet. They'd believe anything (just as they hope that we'd believe any old crap they write down). But if we eliminate the dummy journalist (Thandie), we're still left with the question how an architect (Murphy) could possibly be this clueless. Perhaps being metrosexual hampers his judgment? Dunno, just a wild guess.Due to the badger-sized flying-virus premise, from the start I didn't know what to make of this story. I had two clear-cut options/explanations: either there is a real plague out there but the movie's writers were too daft not to realize that airborne sickness can't be contained by simply nailing pieces of wood on windows, OR the soldier is lying which means we are dealing with a very dumb married couple. It's a no-win situation: either I have to contend with a poor script or with moronic characters. The common denominator of these two outcomes is certainly bad writing. Hence I knew something dumb was afoot.The other problem here is the typical movie-la-la-land conspiratorial the-army-is-out-to-get-us premise: a British soldier is used for biological experiments without his knowledge! Now, while some conspiracy-obsessed left-wing morons out there might consider this as a plausible scenario (because they hate democracies and consider every Western military institution to be some kind of devious, evil organization of the kind we see in computer games for daft 8 year-olds), I personally have grave doubts. First of all, in the UK there is plenty of money to be made by volunteering as guinea-pigs for medical testing. I have personally met several UK residents (all in their early 20s) who had done this, making an extra buck (as much as 100 pounds for a day's work) by spending a day or two, or a whole week in a variety of medical institutions. I.e. the UK military, if it really needed/wanted human test-subjects that badly, would easily find volunteers. There would be no need at all to conduct these tests on unwilling or unaware subjects, which would only pose potentially grave PR problems should this information be leaked to the media. (And unlike Marxist societies - which those same conspiracy-worshiping, gullible left-wing putzes so worship from afar in their comfy Capitalist-made sofas - in democratic countries such blatant and inhumane misuse of power does make it to the media very often.) Not to mention the laughable notion that the military would actually ALLOW someone to escape that easily from such an installation: all the way to a lone island even! If such human guinea-pigs existed in Britain, they'd be kept behind 5 sets of 10-meters thick steel walls and guarded around the clock by dozens of heavily-armed men. Now THERE'S a place from which even a molecule of air could not escape undetected.The only sensible and useful thing the writer/director could have done would have been to show Thandie Newton in the nude. That's the only potential I see in this script, and with this cast. The rest is baloney.