Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Fulke Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

SnoopyStyle Kate (Thandie Newton) and Martin (Cillian Murphy) go to the isolated Blackholme Island off Scotland to escape London. They were there back in happier times in 2002. They are struggling with marital problems about a miscarriage. The power goes out. Martin is injured while trying to fix the generator. They call Doug for help on the radio but they get no help. Then they find a bloodied unconscious man. The man claims to be Private Jack Corman (Jamie Bell) and that there is a deadly worldwide airborne flu. The couple is suspicious of the erratic Jack.The trio try their best to make an intense psychological thriller. The main problem is that the movie has one tone and one gear. It's steady and unrelenting. Jack doesn't change. He starts off scary and stays there. It may be more compelling to start off sane and build to crazy. It's intense but it feels like a manufactured thing. It's not realistic that Martin believes anything Jack says. Jack is basically acting like a paranoid mental case. There is nothing to prove his case other than his word. The movie needs to give the audience the permission to believe in Jack but it never does.

MattyGibbs This is a sparse but nicely filmed thriller which I was drawn to by an interesting premise and a decent looking cast. It starts off very slowly, maybe too slowly but gradually once the mysterious soldier played by Jamie Bell appears the tension increases as you try and decide if the threat is real or imagined. This is a film that keeps you guessing right to the end.Retreat boasts a very impressive cast. Jamie Bell, Cillian Murphy and Thandie Newton are all excellent actors and all put in good performances. The isolated and stunning location provides a welcome diversion at times from the claustrophobic setting inside the cottage. This is a decent thriller with what I thought was a very good ending. Definitely worth catching if you get the chance.

fedor8 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.

the_wolf_imdb When I saw the very first movie about two very stupid and naive people with some crappy relationship problems visited by a psycho, I was not all that impressed. The first twist when they sacrifice their advantage to the psycho might be interesting, but after 20 or so twists its just dull and boring. This movie follows this very formula which makes it annoying. No special effect, nothing like Contagion that I have expected.This movie is incredibly dull and boring, because all these characters are really annoying. The husband is wimpy wimpish wimp with no ability do do anything useful: He cant start a generator. He cant use the RC radio. He cant make decisions by himself. He cant even carry a gun, he can only carry it as it would be a dead mouse. He seems to be able just run around in his nice Nike outfit and be ready to forgive his wife everything anytime. He is really freaky picture of Modern Man and his character fills me with terror.The wife is even more annoying. She is passive aggressive type that cant even do simple house jobs or help with the wood. She is just whiny and complaining all the time. All she can do is hide at home and write her complaints into her shiny Apple MacBook. She cannot use any reasoning from the beginning to the very end of the movie. The only positive thing I can say is that she is at least capable of pulling the trigger from time to time. So she is probably one bit less wimpy that her husband.The nutty stranger is clear nutcase from the very beginning to the end when we can see he is just slightly more primitive version of Modern Man wimp inside. He is pretty annoying like all the bad characters from similar movies. It is just sad for me to see the wimp people to be his slaves from the start to the end giving him every advantage every time. This is just depressing.Fortunately the movie ends well: All these useless creatures are eliminated from the gene pool. Praise the great Darwin! The humanity may see brighter days in the future. One extra star for the positive ending.