How others see it. Viewers note the film's split personality: the first half is primarily a satire of corporate team-building, while the second half sees a Ten Little Indians-style elimination, mostly taking out those we dislike the most.
On the day that I saw this movie, it was ranked #14 in popularity at imdb.com. Of course, the ranking had much to do with the proximity to Halloween, and the enduring popularity of slasher horror movies.
The principal audience for The Conference is horror fans, and they want to fast forward to the slaughter, without much interest in whether Lina (Katia Winter) can prove that Jonas (Adam Lundgren) forged her signature. But it is a surprise that the attractive blonde heroine doesn't do the most to stop the serial killer. Instead, it's Nadja (Bahar Pars) that you don't want to mess with in a dark alley.
How I felt about it. It's a fine effort, and of course you have to credit director and co-writer Patrik Eklund. Eklund owns a slew full of film festival nominations, from the likes of Cannes and Sundance. Many are for shorts instead of features, but that is a matter of budget.
One would hope that another motive would be seeing corporate weasels get what is coming to them, if only in the fictional sense. Nobody, one presumes, thinks that even the worst corporate sycophant deserves to be terrorized and murdered in real life.
Sure enough, the three company shills we hate most: arrogant manager Maria Sid, uber-ambitious Adam Lundgren, and chucklehead suck-up Christoffer Nordenrot, get theirs, while those who don't enjoy being there the most (Katia Winter, Claes Hartelius, and surprisingly bad-ass Bahar Pars) survive. But there is also a random element to who lives and dies, and all the employees of the forest resort are killed, even though they have nothing to do with any evil actions of the mall builders.
Since this is a comedy as much as a horror movie, the characters are all exaggerated. In the real world, employees who publicly challenge their supervisors don't last long at their companies, since they are retaliated against. And folks like Jonas don't last long either, because they are universally despised.
But for the purposes of the movie, it works, more so for the satire of corporate team leadership than the Friday the 13th-style slice and dice. The Jason in this film doesn't care whether people stray from celibacy. He's after the most despicable corporate hacks.