As a now-32-year-old man, Hot Fuzz (2007) hit me in cinemas as an impressionable 13-year-old boy – surely the perfect age for such a brilliant, barnstorming gem of a film. The twists, the action; the way Edgar Wright’s film cleverly subverted the peaceful, picture-perfect postcard of the small English village to flip the script of the audience’s expectations.
Because of that – and because of my dual-pronged infatuation with both zombies and the tough-to-get-right subgenre that is comedy horror – I will always love Nick Frost. (Alright, The World’s End (2013) didn’t channel quite the same magic, but Truth Seekers was good. Attack the Block (2011) is even better.) But unfortunately, there’s no getting away from the fact that Frost’s latest effort – Get Away (2024), in which that slice of fried gold writes, produces, and stars – simply doesn’t offer all that much to write that postcard home about.
Spoilers for Get Away (2024) follow. You’ve been warned!
Frost plays Richard, the patriarch of a family that also contains his wife Susan (Aisling Bea), and – presumably, but it’s not specified straight off the bat – their older kids Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres). The family are driving through the picturesque Swedish countryside, readying themselves for a much-needed break from the English rain.
Maisie Ayres as Jessie in Get Away (2024).
As they stop for a beer and a bite to eat at a restaurant before boarding the ferry to Svalta – the remote, sparsely populated Swedish island of their Airbnb – we’re painted the picture of the archetypal English family on holiday. Here, Frost as Richard is in his element: and between the garbled, memorised snippets of Swedish he’s memorised, Bea as Susan's awkward attempt to order a burger and fries, and the polite, faintly baffled half-smiles, they nail their portrayals of that typical strained, vaguely dysfunctional family of Brits Abroad.
They’re greeted on the island by a mob of locals who are unhappy that they’re there, before the family’s host Matts (Eero Milonoff, in the only performance here that comes close to a star turn) talks the villagers down, and whisks the family off to their accommodation. They’re renting Matts’ long-dead mother’s house – he’ll be staying nearby, on the property, in his own small lodgings. Something feels a bit off with Matts – who presents as creepy and pervy – from the get–go, and it’s soon revealed that the mirrors are two-way, and that he’s spying on the family (most notably Jessie) for his own voyeuristic sexual gratification.
Eero Milonoff as Matts, Get Away's resident voyeuristic sex pest.
In a separate plot thread, Get Away (2024) gives us some insight into what the locals are up to, and we learn that the family’s visit coincides with a local holiday known as Karantän (which translates to "Quarantine"), an annual festival serving as a grim celebration of a period of survival local residents endured during a period of British-imposed quarantine. The locals back then had to resort to cannibalism to survive, and the ritual’s 200-year anniversary is a mere day away.
The family at Get Away's centre receive a less-than-warm reception on Svalta.
Gotta say, I struggled to connect with this strand of the subplot. It was simultaneously underdeveloped (bar an underwhelming 30-second allusion to it in the film’s cold open), and overdeveloped, with the film at times getting too tangled up in its own lore at the expense of developing its characters. Like, why did the festival need to be happening? The film could’ve scaled significantly back on all things to do with the Karantän – which isn’t based on any real aspect of Swedish culture or legend – and wouldn’t have been any worse for it. Plus, once the film’s big twist (which we’ll get to in a moment) happens and Get Away (2024) descends into bloodbath, none of that matters anyway – and it’s hard not to lament the profligacy of the film's attitude towards its audience’s time as wastes such a large portion of its modest 1h 26m runtime overfeeding us that half-baked lore.
These masked men are somehow tied in to Get Away's lore; damned if I could tell you how.
Actually, that would’ve been more bearable if the whole thing had been paced a bit better. Instead of snappier, speedier cross-cuts between plotlines, we get too much time with either the villagers – where there’s a lack of charismatic actors or compelling action – or with Frost’s bumbling, ineffectual British dad. (A schtick that wears off after about 15 minutes.)
Anyways, it transpires that the locals – who’ve blackmailed Matts into their machinations – plan to use a plate of poisoned cookies to kill the family, and somehow use their deaths to "close the loop" of the Karantän ritual, two centuries after it began. It seems the oldest, most prominent villagers are in on it, although some younger ones – Verneri Lilja’s Ingemar, for example – thought that the plan was to scare, rather than kill. Whatever the intention (and again, I probably missed bits, because that whole thread of the film was so unengaging and poorly thought-out) it’s disrupted by the movie’s BIG TWIST®. (Although it’s not such a big twist if you’ve seen 2024's Lowlifes, a film with essentially the exact same twist that came out, in an unfortunate collision of the calendar, only a few months before Frost’s effort.)
The BIG TWIST®? That the family are, well…less a family, and more of a psychopathic collection of remorseless killers. Not too much is explained about their exact relationship to each other (when one of them is killed, another talks about having to “request a cleanup”, so presumably it’s run by some kind of Hostel-esque organisation that organises killing holidays for well-heeled murderers), but it’s clear they’re not who they claim to be.
When Matts delivers the cookies and sees through his bank of cameras that the family are all out for the count, he enters Jessie’s room – wearing her lingerie he stole earlier – for a little facetime. Little does he know, though, that they’re all pretending to be unconscious.
Sorry, not cookies – BISCUITS!!!
They turn the tables on him and stab him, brutally, to death as he writhes around in Jessie’s £22 underwear. While all this is taking place, we’ve also been getting fed scraps of a third subplot – a cop tracking down the culprits of the gruesome murder of a local restaurant owner and his wife. (The same restaurant the family ate at before arriving on the island in, we realise now, a not-so-coincidental coincidence.)
From here, the family essentially go on a killing spree – taking out almost the entire populace of the village in an unbroken series of murders with whatever instruments of death they can get their hands on. It’s easy, of course, to draw parallels with Hot Fuzz (a film that also enjoys a sustained period of protagonists turning the tables on their would-be killers, but with perhaps less dark of an angle) and – when it comes to the bloodshed, at least – 2004’s Shaun of the Dead.
Yet, whether it’s soul, execution, or technical adroitness, something’s missing.
The massacre is neither fun, nor funny – failing, like Get Away (2024) at large, at succeeding as either horror or comedy. Perhaps it’s the sense that the film has a central skein of mean-spiritedness running through its core; maybe it’s the sense that there’s no redeeming purpose or meaning to the violence of Get Away’s final third.
Get Away's bloody third act wants to be smart, but serves up only splatter.
Yes, there are fantastic, witty bits of writing (“Let’s go bag us a Swede,” Sam says. Richard responds: “I thought you were a veggie?”), and there’s an inescapable sense that Get Away (2024) would work brilliantly as a script. But, in transmuting Frost’s witty, crisp English penmanship to the big screen, something vital slips through the cracks.
So, what is the film trying to say?
There’s certainly something in there about tourism, and about its impact on the local populace. 2024 was, of course, the year in which anti-tourism protesters from Barcelona made headlines: assaulting tourists with coffee cups and water guns as a backlash against tourism’s role in pushing up bills, increasing pressure on social services, and feeding existing social inequities. The film is also evidently enamoured with the thematic implications of its own (BIG TWIST®) about face, in that by upending the hostile community trope – and instead leaning into the angle that #touristsarebad – we get the true meaning of Get Away… The English are the real villains!
There’s probably something to be said for the film’s treatment of Swedes, too – who are, in turn, characterised as colluding killers, rude business owners, bumbling cops, officious bureaucrats, pernicious sex pests and, eventually, hapless victims – even though I’m sure the filmmakers did it all “self-referentially”. Because ultimately, despite its attempts at the contrary, Get Away feels like a profoundly euro-centric – or, more aptly, ego-centric – attempt at skewering the toxicity and tastelessness of British tourists on their "holibobs".
For all that, Get Away takes a relatively egalitarian view in the treatment of its characters, in that they’re all equally unlikeable and hard to watch. Between the arrogant Sam, the callous Jessie, and Richard and Susan’s insufferable habit of calling each other “Mummy” and “Daddy”, none are any pleasure to watch. Nor, for that matter, are the Swedes that Get Away (2024) presents us with – a conniving, conspiratorial cabal of mistrustful locals meant to act as comedic foils for the family, but who instead lurch from one awkward scene to another; that is, until the final massacre occurs and they (and we) are put out of their misery.
To be fair, none of that’s helped by the fact that the Swedish characters in this movie speak, almost exclusively, in English – even when in scenes with solely other Swedish characters. I get that this movie isn’t concerned with realism (nor does it need to be) but no idea why they couldn’t simply have had these Swedish denizens of a tiny, isolated, remote Swedish island speaking Swedish. We can read subtitles!
As for the family, while the film gives us the most meagre allusions to their murderous personalities long before the en masse killings begin, there’s not enough foreshadowing to help the twist fully hit home, which robs it of the payout it should carry. And, when the film reaches its conclusion – when the detective from earlier arrives and, seeing one of the Swedish locals attempt to fight back against the family, misreads the situation and blows her head off – it again doesn’t feel earned. What it does feel like – at best – is that we’ve had to sit through the entire uninspiring side plot of the detective, just so he can provide a bit of perverse deus ex machina for the anti-heroes of our central family. At worst, it feels like a shameless attempt to pad Get Away’s already slim runtime out further, and make up for what feels, quite simply, like a lack of ideas.
In a review I wrote of Mortuary (1982) a few days ago, I noted how excited that film’s poster and tagline – not to mention its early 80s timestamp – had me to watch it. It was terrible. Get Away’s problem is similar, although it was chiefly Frost’s record and repertoire that had me excited. It, too, was terrible. What’s more, so much of what plagued Get Away were – somewhat bizarrely – the same fundamental flaw of Mortuary: that it has an identity crisis.
In reaching for the horror, Get Away instead ends up grasping gratuitous, yet weirdly scaled back bloodshed; in reaching for the comedy, it gives us cringey, stilted dialogue and introduces us to characters we’d really rather have stayed at home.
Get Away (2024) is a confused cauldron of ideas – like Frost was holed up in the pandemic, watching Midsommar (2019), while contemplating the best parts of his cinematic successes of more than a decade ago. But, while the triumphs of The Cornetto Trilogy had the innate, timeless chemistry Frost has with Pegg, they came at a cost – that Frost’s most impressive work has been, and remains, tethered to his colleague and chum. When the lead, writer, and producer of Get Away doesn’t have the insanely watchable chemistry of that duo to bounce off, he struggles. Get Away struggles.
This hasn’t been the most glowing Get Away (2024) review, but I still think there’s a film in there – it just needed a more fastidious editor, with some scenes left on the cutting-room floor and more time spent with characters we enjoy being with – and that have a little more motivation than drinking tea and slaughtering local residents.
Frost presents us with a high concept, but there’s just not enough meat on the bones here; nothing to suggest that the decision to green-light this thing for a feature-length film (rather than a 40-minute episode in a horror anthology series) was a worthwhile one.
The many, many fans of Frost’s previous work will feel it’s a must, as I did – and in that case, knock yourself out. But for those instead seeking a horror-comedy that provides on both fronts, I’d recommend taking the advice in Get Away’s title to heart – and steering well clear.
Looking for a horror-comedy that does exactly what it says on the (gore-spattered) tin? Checkout my Braindead (1992) review – Demons (1985) is a hell of a hilarious film, too!
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