GET AWAY - Mark Reviews Movies

Get Away, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

They really don't like outsiders on the remote Swedish island of Svält, and they really, really don't like the British on that island. Hundreds of years ago, a famine devastated the island following a flu epidemic and a quarantine that went on longer than anyone could have anticipated. That's all we learn from the opening section of Get Away, which puts a group of modern-day British tourists on that island and watches as the locals conspire against them.

It's a pretty simple and familiar sort of tale—the stuff of folk horror for several decades of movies and several more in literature. This one, though, is written by star Nick Frost, the comedic actor who knows a thing or two about simultaneously embracing and subverting genre expectations, and that's what he does with the screenplay here. It's the creepy story of outsiders being slowly tormented and led toward the slaughter by the sinister inhabitants of a small island, but it's also wickedly funny—first because the visitors seem so unaware of the obvious threat against them and later for an entirely other reason that cannot be explained without wrecking the joke.

The big punch line of Frost's script is very funny, but the good news, at least from the perspective of not giving away too much, is that the rest of the film is quite funny, too. It's weird and menacing and mysterious in such an over-the-top way that Frost and director Steffen Haars ensure we're always in on the gag, even if none of the characters are—until some of them very much are, which, again, is about as far as any description of the third act should go.

Frost plays Richard, a dull schlub of a man who tries a bit too hard to be personable and gets pushed around a lot for his efforts. Aisling Bea plays Richard's wife Susan, who might know a bit too much about the history of the island for her own good. Her ancestor, as she proudly announces upon arriving on Svält, was one of the British naval officers killed by the island's inhabitants centuries ago.

Immediately, this entire vacation seems like a terrible idea. Indeed, it seems like a particularly awful one before they even reach the island, when a restaurant owner on the mainland gives them a bad attitude, a lot of cold stares, and a dire warning to turn back now before it's too late. The joke, of course, is that the Brits here see themselves as basically invulnerable to the consequences of history.

It's also, in a way, that everybody here is basically getting what they deserve. What else did they expect, honestly? Even the name of the island, the Swedish word for famine, makes one wonder why the locals back in the day were so shocked by their fate. What else did they expect, living in a place with that name?

Richard and Susan also have two teenaged children, Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres), who are real pains when they're not oblivious to the obvious scheming being done against them. Jessie takes a bath, for instance, at one point and hears some rustling and footsteps behind a full-body mirror in the bathroom. She thinks it's a bit odd but nothing to worry about, apparently, but the filmmakers let us know it's exactly what we think it is. The owner (played by Eero Milonoff) of the house the family is renting has a whole setup inside the walls of the house to spy on the vacationers. What else should they have expected, given how overtly depraved the man seems every time he speaks to them?

The adults are ignorant of their attitude, their understanding of what the island's history means for them, and how much the locals want them gone—back on the ferry alive or, well, in the coffins that show up—from the island, while the kids mock everyone—including offering the ultimate insult about one shopkeeper's waffles—and act as if they're above everything. Honestly, we kind of understand why Klara (Anitta Suikkari), the head of an upcoming festival commemorating the how the islanders of olden days handled the tragedy that befell them, wants to bring back an old tradition to this year's celebration. It involves literal sacrifice.

The family surely won't be able to stop the inevitable, but there is a hitch. People are being killed in grisly ways that don't seem to have anything to do with the festival, so maybe the vacationers will be saved from awful fate by way of another. Perhaps a detective (played by Ville Virtanen) from the mainland will figure out the murders and the murder plots happening right in front of him before any of that unfolds.

The pieces of an eerie exercise in horror are here, and the film certainly functions as one. They're so blatantly and cleverly amplified, though, that the material works as comedy, too, taking everything to such an extreme that we have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. The filmmakers and cast know exactly what they're doing to balance those two modes, so even when the story seems to be heading toward a preordained end, the tone keeps the material from becoming stale and predictable.

Ultimately, Get Away is definitely not predictable. Frost has a significant trick up his sleeve that completely transforms the tale and explains why some of these characters are the way they are, but more to the point, it takes the clever subversion and exaggerated elements of this film even further, which is probably the biggest, most impressive surprise of all.

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