Toronto 2025: RETREAT, A Unique Film Shows an Isolated Community Hides Dark Secrets

If a person cannot be understood, if they need something outside of what is common in order to full live and thrive in our society, they are often shunted to the side at best, or at worst, treated as burdens and pariahs. Those who do not live to the common human physical form, such as those who have difficult hearing or are completely deaf, have found themselves the objects or scorn and the subjects or terrible experiments. But those of this community have also sough to create their own worlds where their way of being human is what is common. But that doesn't mean that such a world would be free from human foibles or evils.

Ted Evans, a Uk-based filmmaker, has created such a strange and dark world in Retreat. Billed as the first Deaf thriller, it crafts a story that shows both what could be good about a Deaf-only place, and how human nature can still be selfish and narrow-minded. Evans and most of his actors are part of the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, and that means we are seeing and understanding their experience. This is wrapped in an intriguing tale which perhaps doesn't quite live up to what the story suggests, but creates a decent mystery and world.

Eva (Anne Zander), a woman from Berlin, comes to a retreat in the UK run by and for people in the deaf community. Here, the leader Mia (Sophie Stone) has created a program to help people like Eva work through the trauma and hearing-world-inflicted shame about their difference. Ev a becomes close to Matt (James Joseph Boyle), who has been part of the retreat since he was four years old. He has never known anything other than this world, but various preparations the community seems to maker against outside forces, and acts of commitment they are forced to show to Mia, make Matt suspect that there is more going on than meets the eye.

While in theory, we'd like to think that any director and any actor could portray any human experience; but especially for marginalized communities, there isn't a substitute for the lived experience.  It lends an authenticity to the film that can't be matched, helping us to understand not only how people navigate in a world that rejects them, but the world they create for themselves, one through which we can understand, why those of this community would wan to keep separate from the hearing world.

Eva's introduction to the retreat has something of a rocky start. While she has some hearing with aids, she has to learn British Sign Language, and an early drill in which all the residents have to hide in the basement, in case someone invades the retreat, sets off her claustrophobia. It also sets her to wonder, what danger is so extreme that they would all have to hide in this way? Why is Mia so secretive about how the retreat keeps afloat?

As Eva is given group counselling sessions, following Mia's specific therapy, she lets go of her trauma and guilt. At the same time, Matt finds himself more and more ostracized from the community. As the only one who has never experienced the outside world, he's told he can help Eva in the way she needs. Evans does a terrific job of switching the narrative focus from Eva to Matt; we follow first one outsider as she integrates, and an insider who is then pushed out. Matt then questions Mia's methods, and her insistence on complete loyalty and obedience.

Evans, cinematographer Luciana Riso, and editor Adelina Bichis have clearly done their homework in making us feel this uncanny space. At first it's very bright and welcoming, spaces adapted with lights and vibrations to communicate with the residents, shots framed and edited so we can see each character signing, and how that signing, their language is part of the actor's performance, as much as we would be listening to an actor's speech. And while there is a score, the sound department ensures what we 'hear' this as much as possible, in a way to understand how it works in the non-hearing environment, making it very well suited to the thriller genre.

And for the most part, the story works to show how, even for Mia and her goals, the ends increasingly justify the means, even if those means are increasingly dangerous. As Matt finds himself increasingly on the outside, he's able to see how Eva and others, in their desperate desire to find a safe haven, will overlook how a seeming Utopia can be a dystopia. But the story also builds itself up to be a little more world-shaking, something huge when it's more personal and, while certainly unpleasant, deflates the climax. There's also an over-reliance on voiceover explanation at the end, breaking the pattern of allowing the characters to express themselves through sign language, that plays like an unnecessary over-explanation.

While it doesn't quite stick the landing, Retreat is a tight thriller, immersing its audience in a unique world where we can understand a different subjective perspective too often ignored. With its themes of self-discovery and the desire to keep apart from an unsympathetic world, it's an intriguing study in character and far someone will go to preserve their perfect world.