The Conference (Konferensen)

 The Conference is a new slasher movie from Sweden with a side of (very slight) satire. It's a fun one.

 A bunch of government functionaries get together at a holiday resort for a team-building exercise to celebrate the completion of their latest project: final approval for a shopping center that will (in theory) bring much needed tourism and business to their neck of the woods.
 Not all of them are sold on the achievement, mind; a new hire (Bahar Pars) questions the legality of the proceeds, another (Cecilia Nilsson) the environmental impact of the enterprise, and Lina (Katia Winter, the closest the movie comes to a point-of-view character) comes back from stress-related sick leave to find that the documents on file aren't the ones she remembers signing.
 Opposite them, a trio of corporate-minded morons: bosswoman Ingela (Maria Sid), idiotically trying to put a positive spin to everything, a vapid yes-man (Christoffer Nordenrot) and a sociopath corporate climber (Adam Lundgren) who portrays his character with such bug-eyed intensity he sort of looks like a human ventriloquist dummy.

 The satire angle is kind of fun, but so over the top it lacks any sort of bite. Good thing, then, that it's not the film's main attraction; That'd be a shady figure circling around the resort, killing people quietly at first, and then laying siege to the terrified survivors. Along the way he puts on the oversized mask of the future shopping center's mascot, for full ironic marks.

 It's nothing you haven't seen before (even the work retreat setting/workplace satire is recycled), but it's done well and with gusto. It's reasonably tense, the kills are good, and there's a good mix of characters so that you can enjoy some of the murders and wince at others.

 Things get pretty gory - not nearly as much as in other recent examples of the genre, but there are some fairly gruesome, graphic deaths. Editor Robert Krantz has some fun cutting between the carnage and the corpos having "fun" (someone gets brained with a pan, cut to someone banging a gong), and the cinematography (by Simon Rudholm) is crisp, wintry, and always clear.
 Director Patrik Eklund obviously knows his slashers and does well by them, managing to get some pretty cool scenes (a slow-motion decapitation comes to mind). As for his script (Co-written with Thomas Moldestad), its... well, it's all right. The whodunnit aspect is so perfunctory it might well not exist - even as it's presented as some sort of puzzle - and most of the other plot developments are pretty predictable. But those aren't fatal flaws for this sort of movie; on the plus side, it seeds some tools early on that will later be used in ways that would upset health and safety officers, and takes enough liberties with slasher conventions to earn itself at least some goodwill.