Go Team!

A Spanish dark comedy film on Netflix from Zeta Studios, the outfit behind Elite. Directed by Argentine filmmaker Diego Núñez Irigoyen, written by Cristóbal Garrido and Adolfo Valor. The setup: Tío Mochales, a once-mighty artisanal cheese company, ships its employees off to a rural retreat for a bonding weekend. HR has slides. There are trust falls. The catch, revealed early, is that management is using the retreat to sort who gets laid off. Alexandra Jiménez and Maribel Verdú anchor the ensemble, with Pedro Casablanc, Raúl Tejón, and Blanca Martínez rounding it out.

Jiménez is the reason to press play. She plays middle-management dread with the muscle memory of someone who's sat through too many all-hands, and every time the script hands her a corporate euphemism she squeezes it until it whimpers. Verdú, doing less but doing it exactly right, gives the film the weight it wouldn't otherwise carry. Núñez Irigoyen has a real eye for the specific ugliness of a bad off-site: the beige polo shirts, the branded lanyard, the guy from HQ who says "family" too many times. When the film's just watching people try to survive a group exercise, it's genuinely funny. The writers know their target — the way restructuring gets rebranded as growth — and they land the joke more often than they miss.

It's a 90-minute idea stretched to feature length, and you feel the padding. Once the premise lands, the movie mostly repeats it with the volume knob turning right. Several supporting characters exist to be Types rather than people, so when the film wants you to care later, you don't. The tone wobbles too. It wants to be nasty and it wants you to root for these coworkers, and it never quite decides which. A tighter edit and one more script pass could've made this sing. Readysteadycut called it "instantly forgotten," which is harsh but not wrong.

If you liked Corporate, the Spanish office satires of the last decade, or the meaner stretches of The Office UK, you'll find plenty to nod at. If your bar is Succession-level, you'll be tapping your phone by minute forty. This is a movie for people who've suffered through a mandatory team-building day and want to see one go worse than theirs. It's not for people who hate cringe humor or need every ensemble member sharply drawn.

BACKGROUND TV is where it lands because the ceiling on the craft is a comfortable middle. Jiménez and Verdú are doing better work than the screenplay deserves, Núñez Irigoyen directs it with competence rather than vision, and the story runs out of engine before the runtime does. On the Lecture Test: the film has a clear point of view about how corporations dress up cruelty in HR language, but it earns that point through character and situation instead of speeches. Nobody stops the movie to announce the theme. That's the difference between a satire and a sermon, and this one, whatever else it fumbles, stays a satire. Put it on while you fold laundry. You'll laugh a few times. You won't remember it Tuesday.