Dutch filmmaker Steffen Haars' sophomore picture Get Away sees the North Brabant native reunite with Nick Frost, who starred in Haars' feature debut Krazy House. Frost—who also penned the script—and Aisling Bea play Richard and Susan Smith, an Anglo-Irish couple who embark on a Swedish summer holiday with their reluctant teenage children, Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres). After an unnerving encounter at a café on the mainland, the family head to the island of Svälta, which is chiefly known for a 19th-century episode of cannibalism; an ominous title card denoting the other meaning of Svälta— "to starve, to famish"—sets the stage for the mock-sinister atmosphere that permeates the film.
The family's visit coincides with the annual Karantan festival, which has as its centrepiece a performance of a bum-numbing eight-hour play based on the island's bleak history of survival during a flu-induced quarantine. As expected, the island's inhabitants are less than hospitable and do their best to encourage the Smiths to leave on the next available ferry. Undeterred, the family head to their holiday rental, which is owned by the rather more welcoming—if decidedly creepy—Mats (Eero Milonoff), who informs the guests that his mother met her grisly end in the house's living room. Not long after they've settled in, the Smiths receive a threatening nocturnal visit from a mob of torch-wielding locals.
Despite the ongoing spoiler tactics of Svälta's permanent population, the family doggedly persist with their holiday and plan to attend the production of the mysterious play; as in The Wicker Man—in which an island visitor becomes an unwilling participant in esoteric May Day celebrations—there are strong hints that these guests are destined to be more than mere spectators of this lengthy performance-cum-ritual. As a comic riff on Ari Aster's Midsommar—by far the most obvious reference point here—Get Away possesses a ragged charm, and for the most part it's generally watchable, if a bit undercooked. But at around the two-thirds mark there's a quite brilliant twist that sets things up for a riotously gory finale.
Any horror comedy—Krazy House also falls under the same subgenre—starring Nick Frost is going to contend with unfavourable comparisons to Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, and Get Away is no exception. Like Shaun, Get Away explicitly references more than one straight horror film as it goes about its business, and there is a sense here that Frost actively embraces his legacy as part of Wright's fondly remembered cult movie; he's a likeable presence, but Aisling Bea, herself better known as a comedian, gives the most eye-catching turn in the film as the cheerful, witty Susan. The uneven Get Away largely treads water for its first hour, but the mayhem that unfolds in the final stretch is worth sticking around for.
Darren Arnold
Images: IFFR
