Sean Parker
Twenty years ago, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead introduced the world to a pair of super believable best friends. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s incredible chemistry led the pair to multiple team-up efforts, even beyond Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy. Pegg and Frost have since become household names. However, 2024 has been particularly loaded with Nick Frost projects. In the past month, I’ve seen three of his six releases this year, XYZ Films’ Krazy House, Shudder’s Black Cab, and IFC Films’ and Shudder‘s Get Away, and though I consider myself a fan of Frost’s, I’m growing increasingly weary of his projects.
Get Away, releasing December 6 in theaters, is his latest and easily the best of his three endeavors, likely because he also wrote the film. If you’ve seen Paul, the star-studded alien road trip movie with Simon Pegg, or Cuban Fury, where Frost and Chris O’Dowd dance-fight for the heart of Rashida Jones, then you know Frost is very adept in his comedic writing. Because of these films, I was very excited to see him apply his talents to Get Away’s English-styled folk horror setup.
The Smiths, Richard (Frost), his wife Susan (This Way Up’s Aisling Bea), son Sam (Dampyr’s Sebastian Croft), and daughter Jessie (Criminal Record’s Maisie Ayres) head through the Swedish backcountry for the island of Svälta, first stopping off for a bite to eat before catching the ferry. Throughout the early setup of Get Away, the audience is met with recurring horror tropes, such as a Friday the 13th adjacent harbinger who’s only missing the notable line “You’re all doomed!” They then receive a frosty welcome upon arriving on the island, where the community outlines their two-hundred-year history with English colonists, a tale of a cold winter, low rations, murder, and cannibalism. The film then settles into a folk horror slow burn, inferring a bit of a Wicker Man experience.
The hardest part of all of this is knowing that from the onset of Get Away is knowing that the Smiths are a**holes. They’re entitled, privileged, and intrusive, but that’s the point. In the restaurant, they talk under their breath and avoid confrontations, while on the island, they suggest they have the right to intrude upon the locals’ tradition of Karantän. The Swedish word translates to quarantine and celebrates the grit of the townspeople who survived on the island against all odds. Nevertheless, the unwanted visitors’ vacation provides plenty of animosity for the townspeople.
Films and Shudder. An IFC Films and Shudder Release.
The film is dark, seemingly using some of the leftover atmosphere from Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil by offering up a vacationing Smith family that prioritizes civility regardless of every ominous sign that would set off red flags, bells and whistles in the head of any rational person. The Smiths seem as ignorant of their instincts as Tafdrup’s characters. Instead of creating another rendition of Speak No Evil, Frost and director Steffen Haars go in an altogether different direction as a police officer discovers there may be a killer on the island with them. And with a community that wants them gone, a matriarchal figurehead (Anitta Suikkari) who despises them, and an Airbnb host (Azrael’s Eero Milonoff) who’s watching them in the walls, the suspects are mounting.
The longer the film continues, the more unphased the Smiths are by the locals’ escalating attempts to drive them from the island. I became thoroughly disenchanted by the pure aloofness of the vacationing family and the cartoonish Western tourist arrogance portrayed. While that aspect of the Smith’s collective personality adds to Get Away’s thematic point of culture clash and the history of Western culture, the movie just seemed to repeat it to exhaustion. It’s a berating approach that felt like the movie didn’t think much of me as a viewer. And to that effect, I think most horror sleuths will have Get Away’s final act pegged with many clues hidden in plain sight.
and Shudder. An IFC Films and Shudder Release.
Only in the last half hour does the film supremely entertain, with anarchic blood spilling mayhem and gore to the end. Though that helps bring the movie up a notch, this Get Away remains a bit of a bad trip. While I can appreciate the proper dark comedy that Get Away is, it’s egregiously overbearing and flaunts the subtext with too heavy a hand. At one point, as the family is watching a boat make a delivery that could deliberately be taken as an aggression against the Smiths, I thought of an old John Landis movie called The Stupids, which, while having its occasional moments, was mainly an annoyingly cringeworthy experience.
Get Away’s director, Steffen Haars, is also a co-director of another of this year’s Nick Frost films, Krazy House. I had very high hopes for that movie that boasted a Kevin Can F**k Himself experience of a Christian values family living in a 1980s sitcom. The film is heavily sardonic, absurd, and unhinged, but there’s rarely any laughter outside its prerecorded laugh track. That’s the same sentiment I get from Get Away, as well. While I think Haars’ direction is much better in this folk horror setting, boasting a much more patient hand and providing a tighter, better-flowing experience than his previous effort, the story doesn’t offer enough surprise to take it across the middle-of-the-road.
GET AWAY. Courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder. An IFC Films and Shudder Release.
Performances in Get Away also help the film. The stand-out supporting cast is highlighted by Aisling Bea and Maisie Ayres, who allure in every scene they’re in, and Eero Milonoff and Anitta Suikkari keep things tense for The Smiths on the side of the locals. As for Frost, I remember when Robin Williams did that trio of dark movies right in a row – One Hour Photo, Insomnia, and Death to Smoochy – and it didn’t always work. Frost is very charming as the everyman and has an undeniable way of turning the menace up to eleven. This is disarmingly effective, but I don’t know that the movie itself works, and that’s the difficult part here.
Get Away won’t be for everyone. There’s a lot of buildup to a decent payoff, but it doesn’t amount to a satisfying overall experience. If you liked the bleakness of the original Speak No Evil, you’ll find something of a kindred spirit here but on wholly different levels.
Get Away opens in theaters on December 6.
Get Away: Official Trailer | Nick Frost & Aisling Bea | HD | IFC Films
Opening in theaters December 6. A family’s vacation to a remote getaway takes an unexpected turn when they discover the island they’re on is inhabited by a serial killer.
