In Retreat (2024)

In Retreat

It is difficult to say anything negative about a movie like In Retreat, the debut feature by Iranian born Ladhaki filmmaker Maisam Ali. The film was made on a shoestring budget and has enough oddities to suggest that it is a very individualistic work. However, one of the things about first films is that sometimes it takes artists awhile to figure out how to express their view of life in a way that others can understand.

Though it is a 75-minute film about someone who wanders around with no apparent aim, In Retreat feels very small, even airless. What exactly does Ali want people to get from this movie, besides being impressed by its often beautiful camerawork?

The story follows an unnamed man (Harish Khanna) who has come back to his hometown after an extended absence of unknown length. His brother died recently so he came home for the funeral or whatever but even though he keeps saying he wants to see his nephew and pay his respects or whatever, the guy never goes there. Instead, he goes anywhere else everywhere else in town.

In Retreat studies an avoidant personality but is itself an avoiding film, circling around various potential themes and ideas without ever really engaging any of them. So we see the guy eat a bowl of soup at closing time in some restaurant; get picked up by some party guys who take him to some ceremony where he’s clearly not welcome; end up on the fringes of some local dustup between rival packs of men whose beef (like so much else in this movie) remains mysterious.

Ali seems to be taking cues from the so called “slow cinema” movement here, and his nightbound or just real dark mostly static cinematography does bear certain similarities with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s plot skirting stuff. But even within those parameters In Retreat feels aimless and coma inducing it gives you so little to hang onto that you grow impatient and cross.

In theory, Ali provides an objective correlative for his hero’s experience by asking us to drift through the post return of the prodigal son emotional wreckage along with him. But for a movie like In Retreat to work, the unrelated business in the margins and In Retreat is all margins, baby needs to be illuminating, or at least informative. The most interesting parts of this thing are recurring shots of a little girl making a pencil drawing of the town. But these quick scenes bob along next to everything else, offering neither a metacommentary on what we’re watching nor even just help in finding our bearings within it.

Ali clearly knows how movies work; hopefully next time around he’ll have more substantial ideas to put through their paces.

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