Get Away

Dutch genre filmmaker Steffen Haars reteams with Nick Frost, his star of this year’s far superior ’90s sitcom satire Krazy House, for another bloody and chaotic comedy called Get Away. But unlike most movies in Haars’ oeuvre, he doesn’t share directing and writing duties with Flip Van der Kuil; rather, after years of collaborating with other writers, Frost provides his first solo screenplay. And the concept is killer: In 1824, on the (fictional) Swedish island of Svälta—the original title and a word that, fittingly, means famine—a flu pandemic led to an island quarantine, and the remote inhabitants resorted to cannibalism to survive. Today, they commemorate their history with the Karantan festival. The Smith family from the UK visits the island for a vacation, and despite grim warnings from local harbingers not to go, they plan to watch the famous play staged for the festival. Of course, the residents have some dark secrets, placing the Smith family at risk of becoming a sacrifice, or worse, lunch. 

Frost plays Richard, who shares a macabre enthusiasm for the Svälta holiday with his wife, Susan (Aisling Bea). Her ancestor died on the island, though Frost’s script doesn’t make much of this detail. Their older teen children, Jessie (Maisie Ayres) and Sam (Sebastian Croft), have been dragged along. Sure enough, the town elder (Anitta Suikkari) and the other shifty-eyed residents want them gone. At the same time, their creepy Airbnb host (Eero Milonoff) engages in voyeuristic offenses, including hidden cameras, two-way mirrors, and pilfering Jessie’s underwear. The mildly amusing, winking tone combines with the looming sense of dread with an homage to The Wicker Man (1973), Midsommar (2019), and other folk horror fare. While various warning signs—a dead animal left on the stoop, coffins loaded onto a boat, etc.—establish hints of danger, Get Away culminates in a predictable third-act twist, leading to an over-the-top horror show set to Iron Maiden. The ending is both inventive and so under-explored that it becomes a disappointment. 

Haars and cinematographer Joris Kerbosch use locations in Finland for the Swedish island, capturing a picturesque landscape of dense forest under overcast skies. But no amount of scenery can distract from how the movie plunges into silly bedlam, delivering the bloody goods, just not the ones viewers might have expected. Haars’ lack of interest in details becomes a distraction when, for instance, Richard takes a sword through his cheeks, but the wound barely leaves a mark. The fast-and-loose treatment of the finale leads to unanswered questions about the Smiths and the movie’s whole setup, and the 87-minute runtime is too busy racing through the gory and ironic proceedings to provide satisfying answers. While competently set up and boasting a few fine performances (especially from Frost, Bea, and Milonoff), Get Away begins as a thin pastiche and descends into mindless carnage, but in a way that’s neither clever nor particularly memorable.